THE world has no hope of protecting species from extinction by fencing off
“biodiversity hot spots”, warns a new report. It says these areas of high
biodiversity are home to up to a billion of the world’s poorest people, who
desperately need the land for farming.
“There is no hope of our conserving biodiversity that way,” says Jeff
McNeely, chief scientist at the Swiss-based World Conservation Union and a
co-author of the report. “Hot spots are where people live, too. We cannot
separate people and wildlife. We have to find a productive balance with
Բٳܰ.”
The report was launched in London this week with the backing of Future
Harvest, an organisation representing 16 international agricultural research
centres. The other author of the report is Sara Scherr, a leading agriculture
researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Advertisement
The hot spots approach is the brainchild of Norman Myers, an independent
British ecologist. Preserving just 25 areas around the world which have the
highest biodiversity “would go far to stem the mass extinction of species”, he
reported in Nature last year
(91av, 26 February 2000, p 12).
The areas Myers pinpoints contain half the world’s species, but together
cover an area smaller than Greenland. The idea has been formally adopted by
Conservation International, a US-based private charity which buys up wilderness
around the world.
But the report says that more than a billion people, one-sixth of the world’s
population, live in these 25 hot spots. And these people are often among the
most impoverished in their respective countries. “Endangered species, essential
farmlands and desperately poor humans often occupy the same ground,” says the
report. “It is unrealistic to expect isolated protected areas to carry the full
responsibility for conserving biodiversity.”
The report calls for a new approach to protecting biodiversity which combines
conservation and farming efforts. Dubbed “eco-agriculture”, the scheme has
already been successful in Costa Rica. Examples include planting windbreaks to
connect patches of forest, and growing trees on pasturelands to protect forest
birds and shade coffee plantations. In many cases, bringing nature back to the
fields has boosted productivity by attracting pollinators, improving soils and
providing new crops such as fruit, medicinal plants and fodder.
The development of eco-agricultural systems is often discouraged by the way
research is funded. “Most research is led by the private sector, which wants to
make money by concentrating on the most productive land,” says McNeely. “So they
never find ways of improving the lot of poor subsistence farmers who have the
biggest impact on biodiversity.”
Instead, McNeely calls for more research into subsistence farming. He admits
it won’t make much money, but it “will provide food security for the poor and
help protect biodiversity”. If supported by sound science and policy, he says,
“humans and wild species can share the same ground”.