Gwynne Dyer: International deal on biodiversity a small mercy for the planet

Sometimes we have to be grateful for small mercies. The deal on biodiversity that more than 190 countries agreed in Nagoya, Japan last Friday (October 29) was, as these things usually are, “a day late and a dollar short,” but it’s a lot better than nothing. It’s even better than most people expected.

Technically, it was only the 10th biennial “Conference of the Parties” who signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 18 years ago, but it was not just another meeting. It was a serious effort to move past rhetoric and come to grips with how to stop the slow-motion catastrophe of species extinction. (The current rate of extinction is at least 100 times higher than the historical rate, perhaps as much as 10,000 times higher.)

The negotiations went right down to the wire, but after three weeks of haggling they got a deal on Friday night. The most important target set by the Strategic Plan 2011-2020 will increase the area of protected land in the world—no farming or grazing, no forestry—from 12.5 percent to 17 percent.

That’s almost half the land that should really remain untouched if nature is to go on producing the “ecosystem services” that keep our environment relatively stable. It’s a dollar short, of course: we will ultimately have to give 40 percent of the land surface of the planet back to nature if we really want long-term stability. But it’s a good start.

Even more importantly, the Strategic Plan will increase the protected area of the oceans from only one percent to 10 percent by 2020. If that is done in the right places, it would create no-fishing-allowed marine reserves big enough to allow the many endangered fish populations, some of them down to 10 percent or less of their former numbers, time and space to recover. (Fish multiply pretty rapidly if you give them time to mature and breed.)

The other big achievement of the conference is a deal that promises governments in the developing world, and also indigenous peoples in those countries, fair payment for genetic material that ends up in highly profitable first-world crops and drugs. There are also useful measures to protect life in wetlands, forests, freshwater systems, and coastal zones—and the financing to pay for it.

This is particularly encouraging after the climate change conference in Copenhagen last December ended in a complete train-wreck, for the Climate Change Convention is the long-lost twin of the biodiversity treaty. Maintaining the stable, benign climate of the past 10,000 years is critical to the wellbeing of a global civilization that now numbers almost seven billion human beings—but so is preserving the web of life that underpins that climate.

Both treaties were born at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, an event that was extraordinary in its ambition. The Cold War had just ended, the notion of a single global civilization was gaining ground, and the realization was dawning that the sheer scale and heedless economic style of that civilization were starting to devastate the environment that supported it. The summit was an attempt to stop the destruction before it went too far.

The climate change treaty was intended to tackle the key issue of global warming, but scientists and even lay people were beginning to understand that everything joins up. About forty percent of human greenhouse gas emissions, for example, come from forestry and agriculture, and those same activities are decimating or destroying the living species, many of them microscopic, whose interactions maintain the environment we live in.

But nothing much happened after the signature of the biodiversity convention. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo, and Indonesia continued to be cut down, the world’s fisheries drifted closer to collapse, and though many deplored the neglect, no government did anything about it. After a good start in the 1990s, the climate change accord also stalled after the United States began actively sabotaging the talks under President George W. Bush.

Now the world is emerging from that wasted decade, and all sorts of things that were put on hold at the height of the terrorist panic, or just postponed because the United States wouldn’t play, are back on the agenda. Not always with instant success, as the Copenhagen shambles amply demonstrated—but real progress is possible again, and last week in Nagoya is the proof of that.

Of course, you probably expected me to write about the two little explosive packets found aboard cargo aircraft last week, because that’s so much more exciting than the fate of the planet. But everybody else is doing that, and there really isn’t much new to say about it anyway. Apart from the observation that a civilization that thinks the biggest threat it faces is terrorism is a dangerously deluded civilization.

Comments

5 Comments

Judy Cross

Nov 1, 2010 at 3:43pm

Thanks to the work of a local family, the Zelinskis , Hornby Island has had a marine conservation area in place for years with great success. I support the concept.

What I worry about about are the financial arrangements.

Is this the "good cause", Trojan Horse which will lead to global taxation and/or a global financial system run by the same old crew?

The fact that The IMF and the World Bank tried a bait and switch at Copenhagen is why it failed. They dumped Kyoto where the "rich" would pay the "poor".They wanted ALL countries to pay 2% of GROSS Domestic Product to the IMF which would transfer it to the World Bank which would then lend it out AT INTEREST to the Third World, which would use the money to buy "Green" technology from the first world.
(Remember that Nukes are "Green" if all you are counting is CO2. I doubt whether they are going to buy bicycle driven machinery from the First World.)

The devil is always in the details and the kleptocracy that runs the world loves to take advantage of humanities best instincts.

As for the toner cartridge bomb that wasn't, I suggest people check out what a blooper Al CIA-duh pulled. Nobody is buying it, the story has changed too many times. Check out whatreallyhappened.and infowars

PT Barnum

Nov 1, 2010 at 9:06pm

Thank you for not writing about the explosive packets. It's good to have some news that's both positive and relevant, for a change.

welldoneson

Nov 1, 2010 at 9:12pm

The "stable, benign climate of the last ten thousand years" was neither stable nor benign, nor is anything we see currently out of the ordinary.
Nor is man's CO2 responsible for any alleged changes we see.

Dyer is merely continuing his solid lefty-oriented oratory. "Biodiversity" (sic) is just the latest ruse from the "we know best" set, now that "Global Warming" and "Climate change" have been shown to be propaganda.

What better way to pretend there is a problem than to cast far and wide for a species in decline? It's become a whole new industry, with its own pseudo-terminology such as "threatened", "endangered", "species of concern", "near threatened", "vulnerable"; these are only the few I'm aware of.

Try to imagine a world wherein there are millions of species and NONE of them are in any way declining. The very idea is ridiculous.

Throw in bureaucratic asssertions, such as the US EPA declaring polar bears "threatened" or some such, and you've begun to see what these creeps are doing. In many cases these so-called "threatened"species are at the far limit of their geographic and/or climate range.

Anita Arab

Nov 3, 2010 at 3:20pm

Thank you so much for not writing about the package bombs. I'm really tired of hearing about that. I much prefer learing about what we are doing to save the planet and the positive things that are being done to save all the species in danger. Thanks again.

romeogolf

Nov 6, 2010 at 1:18pm

welldoneson, you're either part of the deluded minority -- angry, white, male, redneck -- or your paycheck depends on you having a very limited understanding of how the Earth works and rejecting what science is telling us: http://vimeo.com/16398444.

As you can see from your Campbell-like approval rating, few here believe your assertions. Unfortunately, your Alberta School mindset is firmly entrenched in our government and not enough people are sufficiently worried to vote the Canadian Republican out.