5 April 2005IPS NewsStephen Leahy
Species are going extinct 1,000 times faster than at any time in history, with up to 30 percent of all mammal, bird and amphibian species in danger of disappearing, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. This accelerated loss of biodiversity on the planet threatens 60 percent of the ecosystems necessary for life, says the 22-million-dollar study that was begun in 2001, promoted by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report, released Mar. 30 and involving 1,300 experts from 95 countries, concluded that 15 of the 24 ecosystem ''services'' that support life on Earth are being degraded or used in an unsustainable fashion. An ecosystem is a complex dynamic of plants, animals, microorganisms and their environment -- water, air, sunlight -- that interact as a functional unit, and their services contribute to the reproduction of life, and include climate regulation. ''Biodiversity underpins ecosystems. Reductions in species reduce the range and quality of ecosystem services,'' Janet Ranganathan, director of biological resources at the Washington-based World Resources Institute, told Tierramérica. ''Ecosystem services are the link between conservation and human development,'' Ranganathan said. A forest, for example, provides a wide range of ecosystem services, such as producing oxygen, cleaning water, preventing erosion and flooding, capturing excess carbon dioxide, and providing habitat for many other species. While clearcutting a forest generates income for a few, the loss of biodiversity -- the trees and other species -- leads to a loss of ecosystem services for many years, and in some cases permanently, for many more people. ''With this understanding we can be much more aware of the tradeoffs involved in converting natural areas,'' said Ranganathan. The authors of the Millennium Environmental Assessment warn that the harm from this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years. Already one quarter of the Earth's land surface has been converted into cropland, grazing land and other food producing areas. Much of this conversion has been recent. Since 1945 more land has been turned into farmland than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, the report notes. While this conversion provided much needed food, timber, fibre and fuel, it has also resulted in a ''substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth,'' the report finds. More than 15,500 species are currently facing extinction and another 60,000 are threatened, according to the IUCN-World Conservation Union's 2004 Red List of Threatened Species. Although the loss of a unique individual species that has survived hundreds of thousands of years is distressing, its role in the web of life may be irreplaceable. ''Reduction in biodiversity weakens the resiliency of ecosystems_ It's not obvious to most people that biodiversity is key to the provision of ecological services,'' says David Cooper, of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada. For example, a plantation forest made up of one tree species is more vulnerable to forest fires than an old-growth forest, Cooper told Tierramérica. Removing biologically diverse wetlands in a region will lead to more flooding because wetlands act as sponges, absorbing excess water. Wetlands also clean water of pollutants, including those that are causing the growing number of dead zones along the world ocean coastlines, he said. ''The valuable services of coral reefs and coastal mangrove forests became clear during the Indian Ocean tsunami'' in December 2004, the expert pointed out. ''The living machinery of the Earth has a tendency to move from gradual to catastrophic change with little warning,'' states the Millennium Assessment. However, the measure of biodiversity should not be focused on total numbers of species, cautions Paul Herbert of the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. Herbert is on the verge of revealing thousands of new species thanks to new scientific technique he pioneered called ''DNA barcoding''. This approach permits the rapid identification of species by examining particular part of a particular gene that is found in all animal species. Herbert has already increased the number of bird species by three percent by correcting previous classification errors. The scientific community hopes that in 10 years, these and other techniques will determine whether there are 10 million or 100 million multi-celled species in existence. Meanwhile the Earth is undergoing what Herbert calls ''global biotic change'', which could have a greater impact than climate change because extinctions cannot be reversed. And those extinctions degrade ecosystem services, he says. ''We need to start seriously thinking about what kind of quality of life we want to have on this planet.'' (* Originally published Apr. 2 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)
