Biodiversity, what’s in a word?: International Year of Biodiversity 2010.
By Dr Eleanor Ballard, Principal Ecologist, WYG
WYG is a global consultancy with over 2,000 expert consultants which includes a dedicated team of sustainability and environment professionals.
Dr Eleanor Ballard, Principal Ecologists at WYG has worked on [relevant biodiversity projects]. As a new year begins and biodiversity is still a topic of conversation, Dr Ballard reflects on the year’s international biodiversity for 2010.
The International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) was a year- long global celebration of biological diversity and its value to life on earth and was planned to coincide with the 2010 Biodiversity Target. This Biodiversity Target was adopted in 2002 by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and by heads of state and government who attended the World Summit for Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg. Its aim was to achieve “a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss” over the last eight years.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was first established at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. It also aims to promote the equitable sharing of the multiple benefits of biodiversity (i.e. so called ‘ecosystem services’). The CBD has near-universal participation, with 193 parties across the globe signing up. The IYB was declared by the 61st session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.
The International Year of Biodiversity was meant to help raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity through activities and educational events around the world. David Johns’ article “The International Year of Biodiversity– From Talk to Action” (Conservation Biology, 2009) explains that the year aims to act as a vehicle to influence decision makers and “to elevate biological diversity nearer to the top of the political agenda”.
As part of the International Year of Biodiversity, funding
Kingfisher in hand
Caption: Kingfisher is an Amber listed species due to its unfavourable conservation status in Europe
was made available by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and its partner organisations for people around the world to submit their ideas for biodiversity friendly projects. The requirements of such projects were to have a positive impact on biodiversity, promote the sustainable use of biodiversity, promote innovative solutions to biodiversity-related problems, motivate individual action to protect biodiversity, and could include ideas which could be adapted and imitated by others, ideas which raised people’s awareness of biodiversity, or showed the relationship between biodiversity and other themes, e.g. taxonomy.
Where do we stand today? It is widely acknowledged that our biodiversity is under threat globally, nationally and locally. In the last hundred years at least 100 species have become extinct in the UK alone. This figure palls into insignificance when we consider that the present extinction rate is estimated to be up to 10,000 times greater than the rate of extinction in prehistoric times. It has been estimated that globally we are currently losing up to 50,000 species every single year. To put this figure in simpler terms, this equates to 137 species every day or perhaps more shockingly six species every hour. If human activity continues to expand at current rates, it is predicted that at least 20 percent of all species will have disappeared in less than thirty years’ time.
The statistics are compelling. A recent study estimated that if every person in the world consumed the same amount of resources as the average person in the high- ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE |155|
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