SAVING fluffy animals requires more than fluffy politics. Environmentalists are warning that a promise made by the world’s governments last year to “significantly reduce” the rate of species going extinct by 2010 will not be met unless they invest tens of billions of dollars in protected areas in the developing world. Without the cash, there will be more conflict than conservation, says Alistair Gammell, international director of Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
In London this week, the Convention on Biological Diversity is holding a meeting of scientists and politicians to debate how to meet the promise to save more species made at last year’s World Summit. Among the new ideas is a global plan to fight local invasions by alien species. Such initiatives represent a significant shift away from policy-making towards direct action, says convention secretary Hamdallah Zedan.
But Gammell says such plans will have no clout without the money to back them up. “The truth is I don’t think they have any idea how they are going to significantly reduce extinctions. They are deluding themselves until they get serious about funding.” He estimates that $45 billion is needed every year to fund key protected areas in poor countries. At least half the money should come from the rich nations, he says. “But I don’t hear any governments talking about spending that kind of money.”
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So far the biodiversity convention, signed 11 years ago, has few genuine accomplishments to its name. Gammell wants to give it teeth by persuading convention signatories to negotiate a protocol with legally binding conservation targets and funding promises. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol bolstered the climate change convention by setting national targets. A decade earlier the Montreal Protocol did the same for the Vienna Convention on Protection of the Ozone Layer. Now biodiversity needs the same, Gammell says.
He claims that without extra funding, many protected areas in poor countries are impractical and immoral because they stop poor people using the only natural resources available to them. The only solution is to fund economic development as well as species protection. “Without it, the poor pay the price of conservation, rather than the international community.”