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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10103179.stm Nature
loss 'to damage economies'
By
Richard Black
Environment
correspondent, BBC News
The
Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies,
a major UN report has warned.
The
third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may
soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to
humanity.
Such
tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of
watercourses and mass coral reef death.
Last
month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their
target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.
"The
news is not good," said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
"We
continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history -
extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical
background rate."
The
global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals,
reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between
1970 and 2006, the UN says.
Seeing
red
The
2010 target of significantly curbing the global rate of biodiversity
loss was agreed at the Johannesburg summit in 2002.
It
has been clear for a while that it would not be met.
But
GBO-3 concludes that none of the 21 subsidiary targets set at the same
time are being met either, at least not on a global basis.
These
include measures such as curbing the rate of habitat loss and
degradation, protecting at least 10% of the Earth's ecological regions,
controlling the spread of invasive species and making sure that
international trade does not take any species towards extinction.
No
government submitting reports to the convention on biodiversity group
claims to have completely met the 2010 target.
While
progress is being made in some regions, the global failure means an
ever-growing number of species are on the Red List of Threatened
Species.
"Twenty-one
percent of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12% of all
known birds (and)... 27% of reef-building corals assessed... are
threatened with extinction," said Bill Jackson, deputy director general
of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which
maintains the Red List.
"If
the world made equivalent losses in share prices, there would be a
rapid response and widespread panic."
 The
relationship between nature loss and economic harm is much more than
just figurative, the UN believes.
An
ongoing project known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
(TEEB) is attempting to quantify the monetary value of various services
that nature provides for us.
These
services include purifying water and air, protecting coasts from storms
and maintaining wildlife for ecotourism.
The
rationale is that when such services disappear or are degraded, they
have to be replaced out of society's coffers.
TEEB
has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion,
dwarfing costs of the banking crisis.
"Many
economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals,
plants and other lifeforms and their role in healthy and functioning
ecosystems," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN
Environment Programme (Unep).
"Humanity
has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without
biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary
world.
"The
truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading
to over nine billion people by 2050."
The
more that ecosystems become degraded, the UN says, the greater the risk
that they will be pushed "over the edge" into a new stable state of
much less utility to humankind.
For
example, freshwater systems polluted with excess agricultural
fertiliser will suffocate with algae, killing off fish and making water
unfit for human consumption.
The
launch of GBO-3 comes as governments begin two weeks of talks in
Nairobi aimed at formulating new measures to tackle global biodiversity
loss that can be adopted at October's Convention on Biological
Diversity summit in Japan.
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