The living world is disappearing before our eyes. Last week, conservation specialists warned us that two-thirds of tortoise and turtle species could be extinct within 20 years. Before that came headlines about the failure of Canada鈥檚 Grand Banks cod stocks to bounce back, the near demise of England鈥檚 large garden bumblebee, and a paper in Nature last month warning that apes are being pushed to extinction by commercial hunting and the impact of Ebola on gorilla groups living in remote forests.
We are presented almost weekly with evidence that a growing human population, profligate use of natural resources and habitat destruction are killing the world around us. According to the World Conservation Union, extinction threatens about 1 in 10 bird species and a quarter of mammals. With fish, mussels and Crustacea, the endangered list perhaps covers up to two-thirds of species. Yet surprisingly, we cannot tell exactly how much is being lost and whether conservation measures are working or not.
The loss of biodiversity has gathered pace over the past 200 years, and even if we cannot find a compelling moral argument not to obliterate everything else on this planet, we should at least be fearful of what it will do to our own species. In the industrialised world, most of our prosperity has been created from the Earth鈥檚 rich variety of life, from the fibres that clothe us, to the foods that sustain us and the drugs that cure us. And some of the very poorest people, up to 900 million according to some estimates, depend even more directly on biodiversity.
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For these reasons the World Summit in Johannesburg last year agreed to set a target of a 鈥渟ignificant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss by 2010鈥�. Although some campaigners attacked it as a soft pledge, the commitment is important because it has the support of policy makers. And with so much uncertainty about rates of biodiversity loss, a quantitative target may have been unrealistic. Achieving a significant reduction will be demanding enough.
Our conservation efforts to date have been guided mostly by estimates of the decline in mammals and birds. Beyond these groups, we remain remarkably ignorant even of how many species there are on the planet, let alone how many are disappearing. Even for those plants and animals we do know about, we understand little about their distribution, ecology or population size. Where the diversity of life is greatest, principally in the tropics, our knowledge is most limited and patchy, and very little is known of the deep sea. Without an increased understanding, we cannot gauge how well conservation measures across the world are working.
快猫短视频s need to improve the way they share and bring together the information hidden away in museums, libraries and informal records. It needs to be transferred into more accessible and useable forms. And before 2010 we urgently need to implement new programmes incorporating improved and consistent sampling methods for the collection of new data as well as to address gaps in our knowledge.
To help the world meet these challenges, the Royal Society has this week published a framework for measuring biodiversity, making explicit existing best practice both for carrying out long-term monitoring and responding to emergencies such as oil spills. An example of how it could be applied is provided by the barndoor skate, whose numbers have been steadily declining since the 1950s due to overfishing in the waters off the east coast of North America. Consultation with local fisheries managers and conservationists would identify the level of accuracy required in determining numbers, and a simulation model of the population could be developed to forecast at what level numbers stop being viable. To inform decisions about areas of fishing that should be closed off, the modelling should also reflect spatial differences in population density and be accompanied by dedicated surveys using trawlers to estimate abundance. Further details of this and other examples will be published in another Royal Society report next month.
But possibly the greatest effort is required in establishing a truly international focus for measuring and monitoring biodiversity loss. Activities initiated under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are mainly concentrated within national boundaries, making it difficult to establish global databases and overviews. Greater co-ordination and co-operation will be needed between conservation groups, academic scientists and governmental and intergovernmental agencies to provide a broader perspective. All this is required to establish reliable baselines and to assess progress.
Inevitably, the achievement of the 2010 target will only be possible if greater investment is made in biodiversity programmes. Many governments regard such work as low priority and there is no well-developed international funding mechanism to support it. We may be reluctant to pay the price of stopping the loss of biodiversity now, but we will end up paying far more in the long run if we turn the teeming Earth into a barren, sterile planet.