Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing
World
Since the biodiversity issue burst on the scene with the 1986 National
Forum on Biodiversity, there has been a burgeoning of conservation
efforts, organizations, research, education and related activities.
Despite many successes, the overall situation is much more precarious
today. The driving forces of increased human population, consumption,
habitat destruction and degradation, contaminants, and invasive species
have been joined by dangerous global climate disruption, globalization,
poverty, political instability and other rapid environmental and social
changes. Paradoxically, the biodiversity issue has largely fallen off
the public agenda, pushed in part by the increased attention to climate
change.
There is an urgent need for scientists, conservationists and
policymakers to re-examine the biodiversity issue. We must both look
retrospectively at a quarter-century of “modern” conservation efforts –
what has worked well and what hasn’t, but also prospectively at the
greater challenges of the next quarter-century. We need to look broadly
at the many scientific discoveries and the many issues involving the
use, abuse and conservation of biodiversity including cultivated as well
as wild species and ecosystems.
The NCSE
conference will bring
together some 1000 scientists, conservationists and policymakers to
develop a strategy to guide a new US Administration and others working
to conserve biodiversity around the world. It will develop an approach
for biodiversity management and conservation in a 21st century context,
including
- Strategies for Biodiversity, Conservation and Sustainable Utilization
- Scientific Needs for Understanding Biodiversity Values, Losses and
Consequences
- Expanding Understanding: Information, Education and Communication
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center 1300 Pennsylvania
Avenue, NW, Washington, DC Metro: Federal Triangle (orange/blue line)
National Council for Science and the Environment
District of Columbia
08/12/2008 at 08:00AM
Posted by Brad Johnson on 03/03/2008 at 07:47AM
At last week’s House Appropriations
hearing
on the FY 2009 Fish and Wildlife Service
budget, FWS chief Dale Hall was grilled on the
service’s implementation of the Endangered Species Act. The Bush
administration has listed dramatically fewer species than previous
administrations after dramatically
reinterpreting
the Act under Secretary Gale Norton’s “New Environmentalism” initiative
to limit its protections for critical habitats. Further, Deputy
Secretary Julie MacDonald was found to have
interfered
with a series of listing decisions (such as the prairie dog and sage
grouse) until her dismissal in
2006.
Hall stated that he finally submitted his decision on the endangerment
of polar bears due to climate
change
to Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Interior, saying that he
expected a final decision to come in a few weeks. Hall justified the
further delay to
reporters:
“It needs to be reviewed and explained to Interior, it can take a while
to understand.”
On February 27, the Center for Biological Diversity
announced
a lawsuit protesting the FWS’s illegal delay
on considering the endangerment of ten species of penguins:
The legal deadline at issue in today’s suit was triggered by a
scientific petition the Center filed in November 2006 seeking
Endangered Species Act protection for many of the world’s most
threatened penguin species, including the emperor penguin in
Antarctica. In July 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the
first of the three steps in the listing process when it found that 10
penguin species may deserve protection and began status reviews for
those species. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s finding for the 10
penguin species triggered the duty to decide by November 29, 2007,
whether the penguins qualify for listing under the Endangered Species
Act, and if so, to propose them for listing. That decision is now more
than two months overdue.