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Leaders try to halt extinctions by 2020
Source: Agencies |
September 18, 2010, Saturday
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WORLD leaders will next week consider a target for halting extinctions of animals and plants by 2020 that many experts rate impossibly ambitious given mounting threats such as climate change and loss of habitats.
"Biodiversity losses are accelerating," said Anne Larigauderie, executive director of the Paris-based Diversitas Secretariat, which groups international scientists and reckons the goal laid out in a draft United Nations plan is out of reach for 2020.
At UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday, nations will discuss how to protect the diversity of plants and animals -- vital to everything from food to fresh water -- after failing to reach a goal set in 2002 of a "significant reduction" in losses by 2010.
The world has made some progress since 2002, such as in expanding protected areas for wildlife. But UN studies say extinction rates are running up to 1,000 times higher than those inferred from fossil records in the worst crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.
Larigauderie said scientists had been largely left out of defining new goals. "Until we have an organized process we will continue to have these sort of feel-good objectives that we are going to miss again," she said.
A draft UN strategic plan for 2020, to be adopted at UN talks in Japan in October, calls for "effective and urgent action" either "to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020" or "towards halting the loss of biodiversity" with no deadline.
"Our goal has to be to halt the loss of biodiversity," said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme.
"Biodiversity losses are accelerating," said Anne Larigauderie, executive director of the Paris-based Diversitas Secretariat, which groups international scientists and reckons the goal laid out in a draft United Nations plan is out of reach for 2020.
At UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday, nations will discuss how to protect the diversity of plants and animals -- vital to everything from food to fresh water -- after failing to reach a goal set in 2002 of a "significant reduction" in losses by 2010.
The world has made some progress since 2002, such as in expanding protected areas for wildlife. But UN studies say extinction rates are running up to 1,000 times higher than those inferred from fossil records in the worst crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.
Larigauderie said scientists had been largely left out of defining new goals. "Until we have an organized process we will continue to have these sort of feel-good objectives that we are going to miss again," she said.
A draft UN strategic plan for 2020, to be adopted at UN talks in Japan in October, calls for "effective and urgent action" either "to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020" or "towards halting the loss of biodiversity" with no deadline.
"Our goal has to be to halt the loss of biodiversity," said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme.
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