UN biodiversity goals a no-go for 2010

William Atkins
Monday, 12 October 2009 20:31

Science - Climate

The members of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity agreed that the world will not meet its target to slow down biodiversity loss by 2010.


Approximately six hundred biodiversity science experts, those that have critical abilities in science and policy with regards to global biodiversity, will meet in Cape Town, South Africa, October 13-16, 2009, for the DIVERSITAS Open Science Conference (OSC) because of growing concerns that “… the pace of biodiversity loss is worsening in many places….”

The Diversitas OSC website states, “Experts say changes to ecosystems and losses of biodiversity have continued to accelerate. Since 1992, the most conservative estimates suggest that total tropical rainforest greater than the size of California has been converted mostly for food and fuel.”

It adds, “Species extinction rates are at least 100 times those in pre-human times and are expected to continue to increase. The focus of biodiversity science today, however, is shifting from simply describing problems to solving them.”

The Diversitas OSC2 (Open Science Conference 2)) website is Biodiversity and Society: "Understanding connections, adapting to change.”

The 123 international ministers of the Sixth Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in April 2003, agreed to "… achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth." [Diversitas OSC press release]

According to a press release from the Diversitas OSC “World Will Miss 2010 Target To Stem Biodiversity Loss, Experts Say,” these experts have already agreed that the target to stem biodiversity by 2010 will certainly be missed.

Page two contains comments from Dr. Georgina Mace, the vice-chair of the Diversitas program.