14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of days ago, the United Nations Environment Programme made it public news that, during its latest Biodiversity Conference, several of the world's governments decided that doubling the present funding for biodiversity conservation was the right thing to do.
Interestingly enough, their agreeing to spend more money on green-oriented issues comes at a time when the ongoing economic crisis is still placing considerable amounts of strain on national budgets.
However, it seems that their decision has more to do with financial incentives than one would initially suspect.
Thus, it has not been that long since we last reported on how a poor understanding of the natural world could compromise food security, and therefore lead to a noteworthy food crisis which would in turn negatively impact on economies worldwide.
As the Minister of Environment and Forests for India, Smt. Jayanthi Natarajan, now puts it, “The present economic crisis should not deter us, but on the contrary encourage us to invest more towards amelioration of the natural capital for ensuring uninterrupted ecosystem services, on which all life on earth depends.”
Besides agreeing to list various marine ecosystems as ecologically or biologically significant ones, the 193 nations that stand at the core of the UN Convention on Biological Biodiversity (CBD) also intend to finance further research into the effects of pollution and climate change on aquatic environments.
All in all, it is expected that an additional 8 million square kilometers of marine and coastal areas will soon be listed as protected as early as the year 2020.
Given the fact that, for the time being, roughly 50% of the world's most biodiverse regions still lack protection, this comes as good news indeed.
“These results, coming in a period of economic crisis, demonstrate that the world is committed to implementing the CBD. We see that governments are moving forward in implementation and seeing biodiversity as an opportunity to be realized more than a problem to be solved,” explains Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, the executive secretary for the CBD.