The big corporate brotherhood encircling COP10's premises are united by a very simple creed: a vague, weak treaty is better for business and Nature must be monetized to have any worth at all. We in civil society must be equally clear in our thinking if we hope to foil their threat.
Thousands of activists are expected to come to COP10 representing issues as varied as the living world itself. Finding common ground and mutually intelligible language will be a real challenge and we might as well start those explorations here.
Some neo-abolitionists are seeking a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights that would liberate natural life from the slavery of property law and accord it freedoms of its own. Imagining how that could and should work is the first step to achieving it and we look forward to your help.
For those visiting Japan for the first time, there are lots of lovely sane traditions here that have nurtured biodiversity for many centuries. Though hard to see in the gargantuan COP10 hall or the lifeless river next door, this wisdom does survive and is still struggling to prevail, and we offer samples here.
For many long-time activists, our struggle is our glory, but just to keep from burning out we've learned to love our partying, too. COP10 will offer some deadly struggles, but also many lively performances, concerts and side events that will be listed here.
Those of you heading to COP10 with press badges may be interested in the following.
Access to Japanese Delegation Briefings The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) will draft a letter and hand-deliver it to press officers at the Foreign, Environment, and Trade Ministries calling on the Japanese government, as host of COP10, to ensure fair and equal access to Japanese delegation briefings by non-press club media. Specifically, FCCJ will request that the Foreign Ministry, at least, ensure that an international media liasion is available each evening, after the daily Japanese language briefing, to answer questions from interested press on what the Japanese delegation to COP10 is thinking and doing.
In 2002, 188 countries launched a global initiative, usually referred to as the 2010 biodiversity target, to achieve by this year a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss. The plan was widely reported as the beginning of the end of the biodiversity crisis. But in May this year, the Convention on Biological Diversity admitted that it had failed. It appears to have had no appreciable effect on the rate of loss of animals, plants and wild places.
In a few weeks, the same countries will meet in Nagoya, Japan and make a similarly meaningless set of promises. Rather than taking immediate action to address their failures, they will concentrate on producing a revised target for 2020 and a "vision" for 2050, as well as creating further delays by expressing the need for better biodiversity indicators. In many cases there's little need for more research. It's not biodiversity indicators that are in short supply; but any kind of indicator that the member states are willing to act.
Rich countries have been put on the back foot after new research showed that current pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions could be wiped out by gaping loopholes in the UN climate change treaty put forward in Copenhagen last year.
Developing countries have argued strongly for minimum 40% emission cuts from industrialised nations by 2020. But new analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network (TWN), released at the latest UN climate talks in Bonn, showed that current pledges amounted to only 12-18% reductions below 1990 levels without loopholes. When all loopholes were taken into account, emissions could be allowed to rise by 9%.
Washington — While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.
Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn, about a third of which is made into ethanol, leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life.
Known as hypoxia, the oxygen depletion kills shrimp, crabs, worms and anything else that cannot escape. The dead zone has doubled since the 1980s and is expected this year to grow as large as 8,500 square miles and hug the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas.
Scientists plumb the depths to ask how many fish in the sea
"In every region, they've got the same story of a major collapse of what were usually very abundant fish stocks or crabs or crustaceans that are now only 5-10% of what they used to be."
It has been the biggest and most comprehensive attempt ever to answer that age-old question – how many fish are there in the sea?
Published today, a 10-year study of the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the world's oceans attempts just that. The Census of Marine Life, which hopes to paint a baseline of marine life, estimates there are more than 230,000 species in our oceans.
"From coast to the open ocean, from the shallows to the deep, from little things like microbes to large things such as fish and whales," said Patricia Miloslavich of Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela and co-senior scientist of the COML. The study also covers crabs, plankton, birds, sponges, worms, squids, sharks and slugs.
The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.
Scientists have discovered that the phytoplankton of the oceans has declined by about 40 per cent over the past century, with much of the loss occurring since the 1950s. They believe the change is linked with rising sea temperatures and global warming.
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.
“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.
It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.
Current efforts to protect the world's biodiversity run the risk of doing more harm than good, warns Krystyna Swiderska. In this week's Green Room, she says the role of indigenous and local communities in protecting the planet's genetic resources are being overlooked or even ignored.
In October, representatives from 193 governments will meet in Nagoya, Japan, to hopefully adopt a historic new international law that aims to ensure the world's biological resources are used in a fair and sustainable way.
It's about time.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that a third of all genetic resources for food and agriculture have already been lost in the last 100 years.
More than one-in-four of all flowering plants are under threat of extinction according to the latest report to confirm the ongoing destruction of much of the natural world by human activity.
As a result, many of nature's most colourful specimens could be lost to the world before scientists even discover them, claims the research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Extinction is likely to be one of our longest-lasting legacies.
To address this crisis, we will need landscape-level management of wilderness and human-impacted areas, community involvement, legislation, economic incentives, bioliteracy, unified conservation science, and attention to the prime drivers of extinction: growth of the human population and its aggregate consumption.
The new field of ecological economics, which synthesizes human activities and natural processes, can quantify the costs and benefits of biodiversity protection.
We need a social transformation, through education and ecological literacy, to make human-caused extinction a thing of the past, like the slave trade, apartheid, and the Iron Curtain.
“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.” -- Erwin Schrödinger
Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic
My own research... shows the critical role that traditional farmers and healers play in sustaining and enhancing genetic diversity 
