Australian scientists say they have come up with a more cost-effective way to preserve biodiversity.
Ecologist Dr Richard Fuller, from the University of Queensland and CSIRO, and colleagues, report their findings today in the journal Nature.
"It's a potentially controversial idea because we're talking about reorganising the way the [reserve] system is put together," says Fuller.
Fuller says the traditional approach to conserving biodiversity is to gradually increase the number of protected sites, but this doesn't consider how effective the existing reserve system is.
In a review of these two projects, Leslie Thatcher writes: "What Marie-Monique Robin most effectively documents are the perverse effects - the moral, social, technological, economic and market failures - of Western society's economic organization, most specifically with respect to science and the products of science and, ultimately, with respect to the preservation of the public commons and human life on the planet."
On the high seas, the bluefin is being hunted into extinction. Will we ever be able to think about seafood the same way?
On the morning of June 4, in the international waters south of Malta, the Greenpeace vessels Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise deployed eight inflatable Zodiacs and skiffs into the azure surface of the Mediterranean. Protesters aboard donned helmets and took up DayGlo flags and plywood shields. With the organization’s observation helicopter hovering above, the pilots of the tiny boats hit their throttles, hurtling the fleet forward to stop what they viewed as an egregious environmental crime. It was a high-octane updating of a familiar tableau, one that anyone who has followed Greenpeace’s Save the Whales adventures of the last 35 years would have recognized. But in the waters off Malta there was not a whale to be seen.
BONN (IPS) - Seeds were once for ever. After harvest, a few from the crop would be planted for the following year, and so it went on.
Now, biochemical industry giants are making seeds themselves infertile. You sow them this year, and that's it. For next year's crop, you need brand new seeds - you would have to buy them, of course.
Twenty-five years ago, there were at least 7,000 seed growers worldwide, and none of them controlled more than one percent of the global market. Today, after a takeover spree, 10 major biochemical multinationals, including Monsanto, DuPont-Pioneer, Syngenta, Bayer Cropsciencie, BASF, and Dow Agrosciences, control more than 50 percent of the seeds market.
RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS) - Brazil is a world leader in agriculture and on several environmental issues, but it will find it hard to reconcile both fronts, judging by the many battles lost by former environment minister Marina Silva, in spite of the political clout she wielded for over five years.
The advantages enjoyed by agriculture in this country are not limited to the availability of vast amounts of land and water, and a favourable climate. Brazil has developed technology and practices that have greatly increased crop yields, and made it an unbeatable exporter of a large number of products.
Latin America's vast biological diversity has contributed little to the region's commercial agriculture, despite being the birthplace of two of the world's four most widely consumed food crops: maize and potatoes.
RIO DE JANEIRO (Tierramérica).- The current global food crisis has fuelled the debate about agricultural production and trade, including the sharp decline in the diversity of commercial crops.
Over the course of human history, people have consumed more than 7,000 species of plants. But in the last 100 years, about 75 percent of food crops have fallen by the wayside and now just three staples -- wheat, maize and rice -- make up about 70 percent of our caloric intake, according to United Nations figures.
PARIS — More than 90 countries have approved the creation of a scientific panel on biodiversity, the dream of many scientists around the world.
The panel will peer-review scientific research on biodiversity and ecosystems to ensure governments are receiving top-level information and advice, and are able to act more decisively to reverse various trends in the natural world.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as it has been called provisionally, was "the dream of many scientists", now made reality, said Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general.
The fourteenth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) convened at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Gigiri, Nairobi, Kenya, from 10-21 May 2010. More than 700 participants attended the meeting, representing governments, UN agencies, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, indigenous and local community groups, public sector research, academia and business. The conclave ended with major conflicts and only minor progress indicating a challenging agenda for Nagoya's COP10 negotiators.
For a full wrap-up report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, click here.
For NGO commentary from the CBD Alliance, click here. For related news reports, see below...
NAIROBI--A preparatory meeting in Nairobi for an upcoming U.N. conference on biological diversity closed Friday after failing to resolve most of the disagreements over a strategic plan to stem the loss of plant and animal species.
From forests in Japan to sea turtles in Tanzania to Scottish school dinners, the evidence of the global biodiversity crisis is evident - The economic case for saving biodiversity
Forests, Japan Concerned about widespread abandonment and degradation of forests in Japan, the national Science Council carried out a study of the benefits of taking action to save them. Their report put the total value of the ability to absorb carbon dioxide; use of wood instead of fossil fuels; reduction of erosion and flooding; regulation of and cleaner rivers, and health and recreation, at ¥70 trillion (£535bn) every year. This evidence was used in many prefectures to introduce a new annual tax of ¥500-1,000 a person and ¥10,000-80000 for businesses specifically to fund restoration and enhancement.
"A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.
In an open letter sent of May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds..., and on what is left our environment in Haiti."1 Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
“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
An Interview With Marie-Monique Robin
By Paul Greenberg
