October 19, 2010
Biodiversity
Today, delegates from over 190 nations are converging at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Nagoya, Japan. For 2 weeks, they will be discussing ways to curb the erosion of biodiversity on the planet.
Ryo Matsumoto, Japan’s Environment Minister said “we are now close to a ‘tipping point’ – that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible”
It is critical that nations do something now to fight the loss of biodiversity on the planet. What’s frustrating is that we’ve seen how nations have been unable to move forward on climate change so it’s hard to be positive about the outcome of this convention.
When it comes to the oceans, fighting a loss of biodiversity means creating more marine protected areas and developing and implementing more effective fisheries management measures. So much of the ocean has yet to be discovered – this year’s Census of Marine life suggested that over 750,000 marine species have not yet been identified.
We’ll see how it goes over the next 12 days.