Slowing biodiversity loss: not there yet - July 02, 2009
2010 marks a fairly ambitious deadline for the globe: no more species going extinct. With six months to go, and human activities continuing their tear through wildlife-rich habitats like rainforests and oceans, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to need an extension. Now the world’s authority on species conservation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is waving the latest assessment of its venerable Red List around to raise the alarm.
The 2010 biodiversity target originated in 2001, when the European Council concluded that “biodiversity decline should be halted with the aim of reaching this objective by 2010.” In 2002, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) softened the goal to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss,” and a few months later the World Summit on Sustainable Development echoed the CBD’s pledge. In celebration, the UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.
But despite the nominal unity, things are looking pretty grim. On 2 July the IUCN released its assessment of threatened species, which looked at whether the statuses of threatened species were improving or deteriorating. In a laborious analysis, described by its authors as “a labour of love,” the group assessed 1,500 randomly selected species from each species group (e.g. dragonflies, freshwater crabs, gymnosperms). The conclusion: 2010 isn’t going to happen.
The lack of progress doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that the primary driver of species extinction — habitat destruction — continues to charge along, albeit at a slower clip in temperate regions. But the CBD notes that “this may not necessarily translate, however, into lower rates of species loss for all taxa because of the nature of the relationship between numbers of species and area of habitat, because decades or centuries may pass before species extinctions reach equilibrium with habitat loss, and because other drivers of loss, such as climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species, are projected to increase."
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