UN: Biodiversity lost at a rate never seen

Nairobi (global-adventures.us): Species are declining at an alarming rate, the United Nations says in the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook report. The process may soon begin to undermine the performance of national economies since global ecosystems have to deal with the loss of large areas of forests and the collapse of coral reef ecosystems.

"The news is not good," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive-secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. "We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."

The report says that three potential tipping points pose the greatest danger:

• The dieback of large areas of the Amazon forest, due to the interactions of climate change, deforestation and fires, with consequences for the global climate, regional rainfall and widespread species extinctions.
• The shift of many freshwater lakes and other inland water bodies to algae-dominated states, caused by the buildup of nutrients and leading to widespread fish kills and loss of recreational amenities.
• Multiple collapses of coral reef ecosystems, due to a combination of ocean acidification, warmer water leading to bleaching, overfishing and nutrient pollution; and threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of species directly dependent on coral reef resources.

Amphibians are in particular danger and the number of vertebrate species fell by about 33 percent between 1970 and 2006. Biodiversity will continue to decline at a massive rate, the report says, and essential services that the natural environment offers the human society will see a severe drop.

"Many economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems from forests and freshwaters, to soils, oceans and even the atmosphere," said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and executive director of the UN's Environment Program. "Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050."

The greatest threats to biodiversity relate to overexploitation, habitat change, invasive species, pollution, and climate change, according to the report. Challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed by policymakers with equal priority and in close co-ordination, if the most severe impacts of each are to be avoided.