Oct 2010

The 10th Convention on Biological Diverity is currently meeting in Nagoya.

Why it is important?

The definition of a concept fundamental to the ongoing survival of life mutates readily but today my preferred definition is:

Biodiversity is the continually changing array of life forms, the plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes, the ecosystems they form and the processes they live by, in a unique, never to be repeated, evolutionary process that connects all life that originates from the energy and matter in the beginning of the universe.

The concept emphasises the living processes of the planet, the result of ten billion years of activity in the universe and four million on this planet, perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand for language and a few thousand for writing[i]. Biodiversity is the constantly changing sum of our world in the ongoing present and dependent of the processes of evolution and extinction.

Evolution is a natural ongoing experiment by life forms to replicate. Thirty billion species of plants and animal are estimated to have existed, about 30 million now exist. That means 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. There is no reason to think that our own species will not suffer the same fate.[ii] Unless of course you do not believe in evolution as an explanation of how life began or how humans came to be squatters on this planet.

Though extinction is as natural a part of evolution as birth, the rate of extinction has increased dramatically due to human activity.[iii] Already in NSW, about 27 mammals have become extinct and over 400 plant species are considered either endangered or vulnerable since European settlement. Australia has radically changed its patterns of land management in two hundred years, compared with more than 10,000 years in the Middle East[iv]. Continuing damage to ecosystems, particularly the destruction and fragmentation of habitat, represents a major threat to biodiversity.

[i] The latest estimates vary depending on whether one uses the expansion of the universe and works backwards or measure the age of stars which tends to give a higher figure of 12-14 billion years. This may remind us that science only approaches truth. Newtonian mechanics works very well in most instances, quantum mechanics accounts for certain phenomena which Newtonian system cannot. However, all science is a working hypothesis.

[ii] John Leslie, The End of the World, The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, 1996. Through probability theorising rather than anticipating nuclear terrorism, he concludes that we, as a species, are likely to die out sooner rather than later.

[iii] There is the argument that one has to look at the process of evolution and that without the catastrophe at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary which resulted in the rise of many more species including mammals. The atmosphere is a result of photosynthetic organisms evolving which poisoned the air for the ancient prokaryotic inhabitants. Frederik Turner essay in From Beyond Preservation - Restoring and Inventing landscape, Ed A.D. Baldwin Jnr. et al, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

[iv] Hobbs, R.J. & Hopkins, A. 1990. From frontier to fragments: European impact on Australia’s vegetation. Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia. 16 pp 93-114.

The news isn't good (in this The International year of Biodiversity).

29 Oct.

The Earth Summit (Rio 1992 established UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity (the CBD), the latter never had much profile. The target to slow global biodiversity loss by 2010 by The Sixth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2002) has utterly failed. Under its Program of Work there was no obligation of sovereign states to implement it. Rather point 15(b) of the Declaration affirmed that States have "the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies."

18 years of debate has led to the 2010 meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, a fortnight of fraught bargaining, mainly between the developed world vs the poorer nations, the former not providing the money needed for protection of biodiversity hotspots in poorer countries nor sharing the benefits of exploiting the resources of such areas, for medicine for example. Agreement was finally reached on 20 key "strategic goals" to be implemented by 2020 that should help to end the current mass extinction of species.

One of these goals is to extend national parks to increase protected land from the current 12.5 per cent to 17 per cent globally, and oceans from 1 per cent to 10 per cent by 2020. This will impress local fishing groups commercial and recreational, who are fighting an extension of no catch zones in the nearby Solitary Islands Marine Park (containing over 550 species of reef fish, 90 species of hard coral and 600 species of molluscs).