biodiversity

Why save the planet if you don’t know who lives here?

There were plenty of depressing numbers out there this Earth Day, from dwindling numbers of moose in Minnesota to ongoing honey bee decline.

But to me, this takes the Prozac-frosted cake: a study found that while young people could identify a thousand corporate logos, they couldn't identify even a handful of plants and animals in their backyards. Will future generations care about protecting the planet if they can't even pick a starling out of a lineup?

How can we start to change that? The No Child Left Inside Coalition has a simple idea: get 'em outside:

Private equity firm buys rights to rainforest reserve’s environmental services

This picture of what appears to be an insect with rainbows flying out its butt was taken in Guyana.

There are untold, untapped, unknown chemistries created by millions of years of evolution harbored in what remains of the planet's biodiversity. This is a vast storehouse of information, which would provide humanity with centuries of medicines and other benefits if we can just find ways to preserve it.

We can't let our biodiversity disappear -- one interesting (and gross) example of its importance is in this video I found on YouTube, documenting one of the unending evolutionary struggles between lifeforms. We are also locked in an evolutionary struggle with microbes. Many of today's most important medicines got their start in nature. Penicillin and its derivatives, for example, came from a mold.

Mongabay has a hopeful article about an equity firm betting on the future:

"How can it be that Google's services are worth billions, but those from all the world's rainforests amount to nothing?"

On the oddity of privatizing nature

Given the uncertainty accruing to traditional investments in today's economy, here's a trend to consider: the monetizing of ecosystem services. One of the first public discussions of this, the Biodiversity & Ecosystem Finance Summit taking place in New York this weekend, aims to answer this question: how can financiers and corporations take a lead in biodiversity and ecosystem conservation? (I can think of a few ways, yes.)

Welcome to the developing area of "biodiversity finance," which seeks to monetize biodiversity and ecosystem assets like wetlands, rainforests, reefs, and so forth so they can then be protected -- at a profit. Sounds spooky, right? But there are examples out there already, and not just the conservation-minded hobby ranches à la Ted Turner that we're seeing all over the Rocky Mountain West. Take this example [PDF] from Virginia, where private equity has bought the last large piece of the Great Dismal Swamp:

Fixing environmental problems necessary and doable, says OECD

It is not only highly necessary but entirely affordable to tackle climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and other environmental problems, according to a report released Wednesday by some wacko environmentalists the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Summed up OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria: Solutions “are available, they are achievable, and they are affordable” […]

Encyclopedia of Life up, but empty

A tip from Canis sent me to the Encyclopedia of Life, which came online last week. I posted on this project about nine months ago. I was skeptical that it would amount to much back then, so I was curious to see if I had missed the mark (as usual). I typed in a bunch of species and found nothing but placeholders for them. The site is still an empty shell, about 99.999 percent short of its goal. They have the categories in place, ready for armies of professional, hand-selected curators with nothing better to do than volunteer their free time to fill in the information.

Yes, I'm still skeptical. The whole idea behind Wikipedia is bottom-up data acquisition. In a sense, it is analogous to a free market: iterative and imperfect, but productive and useful. If every article in Wikipedia had to pass muster from an appointed expert on each subject, there would be no Wikipedia. The EOL will never see the success of Wikipedia with its present top-down, command-and-control structure.

A third of avian species on land could disappear this century as a result of climate change

In more depressing bird news, researchers at my alma mater estimate that up to 30 percent of all land-dwelling bird species could be extinct by 2100 as a result of global climate change. The study, published this week in the journal Conservation Biology ($ub. req'd), modeled bird population responses to changes in vegetation for over 8,000 species and 60 scenarios, and is one of the first analyses of extinction rates to incorporate information from the recent IPCC reports. I think I'm going to go cry now.

What the fate of two old turtles says about China’s future

Having spent two summers researching amphibians and reptiles, I have a poster of endangered frogs and salamanders on my wall what one might call a healthy fascination with these endearing ectotherms. Being thus inclined, my eyes lit up when I stumbled on The New York Times’ latest feature, “China’s Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis.” It’s […]

Experts push for an intergovernmental biodiversity panel

For this enviro, Christmas is shaping up pretty nicely this year. Today, as post-Kyoto discussions commence in Bali, Australia has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, sweeping aside decades of Howard's curmudgeonly climate skepticism. Another unexpected gift came last month, when a group of 80 experts convened in France to mull over the future of biodiversity. Their consensus? That we need to establish a new intergovernmental panel -- akin to the IPCC -- to begin aggressively addressing the biodiversity crisis.

In words that would surely make E.O. Wilson proud, the committee said: "It is not enough to draw up a list of threatened or extinct species. Biodiversity needs to be seen as a whole, in terms of management but also of environmental services rendered, for instance from the point of view of adaptation to climate change." They hope to have a structure in place by 2008. Keep 'em rollin' in, Santa!

Photos of species threatened by climate change

The following photos and excerpt — highlighting the threats posed to animals and plants by climate change — are drawn from Gary Braasch’s new book Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, published by the University of California Press, © 2007. Featuring more than 100 photographs, Earth Under Fire shows species, cultures, […]