CONSERVING BIODIVERSITY HOW MUCH NECCESERY ?

-Dr. Kedar Karki

M.V.St.Preventive Medicine

Introduction:
The conventional approach to preserving biodiversity has emphasized the
creation of parks and preserves, plus offsite conservation facilities such as zoos and
botanical gardens. This approach has helped sustain many species, and it can mitigate
some of the effects of threats such as habitat loss, overexploitation of plant and animal
species, air and water pollution, the introduction of nonnative species, large-scale
agriculture and forestry, and global climate change. Yet many such efforts do not address
the root causes of biodiversity loss. The Global Biodiversity Strategy has identified
several of these root causes: burgeoning human populations, increasing consumption of
resources, ignorance about species and ecosystems, poorly conceived policies, and
economic causes such as the effects of global trading systems, inequity in resource
distribution, and the failure of economic systems to account for the value of biological
resources. Many of these root causes occur simultaneously and are intricately connected.

ROOT CAUSES OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS

Population Growth and Increasing Resource Consumption
The world's population has more than tripled in the 20th Century, and continued growth is
assured over the next 50 years, especially in the developing countries. Humankind's
burgeoning numbers have an increasingly voracious appetite: people use or destroy about
40 percent of the net primary productivity of terrestrial and aquatic plants. At the present
pace, the Earth's renewable resources are rapidly being depleted: the probable doubling
of the world's population over the next 50 years will greatly increase these pressures.
The issue of population is not only a matter of numbers, but also of patterns and
levels of resource consumption. The average resident of and industrialized nation uses 15
times as much paper, 10 times as much steel, and 12 times as much fuel as a person in a
developing country
Population growth and increasing resource consumption affect biodiversity in two
ways: they create pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land,
and they produce wastes that pollute habitat and poison wildlife. These trends can be
offset by stabilizing populations, using resources more efficiently, recycling, and
controlling pollution.

Ignorance About Species and Ecosystems

Knowledge about the world's life forms lags surprisingly far behind other fields of
scientific inquiry. While a great deal is known about individual species of birds, fishes,
mammals, and plants, fewer than 1.4 million of the structure and functioning of
ecosystems is just as scant.
Information is also limited on the condition and value of biological resources, as
will as uses and management techniques employed by traditional cultures over the
centuries. For example, residents of one forest village in Thailand eat 295 different local
plants and use another 119 for medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that
3,00 plant species are used for birth control by tribal people around the world. This
knowledge is rapidly disappearing along with the indigenous tribes that possess it. Over
6 million tribal people lived in the Amazon basin 500 years ago: today there are only
about 200,000. Compounding the problem is the lack of trained scientists and engineers
in many of the developing countries where biodiversity loss is the most severe.

Poorly Conceived Policies

Government policies designed to encourage some sectors, such as agriculture of forestry,
can have the side effect of destroying biodiversity. For example, policies that award titles
to settlers who " improve" or clear the land can result in the destruction of biodiversity.
In Botswana, the government provides full cash subsidies for farmers to clear, plow,
seed, and fence up to 10 hectares for cultivation. Modern land laws are generally
incompatible with the few remaining community property systems, such as that of the
Cree of Canada, in which hunting and gathering are strictly regulated for the long-term
benefit of a group.
Simple lack of coordination between government agencies with overlapping
responsibilities may also result in loss of biodiversity. For example, an environmental
agency may be charged with halting deforestation while the agriculture ministry tries to
boost crop exports by subsidizing farmers to clear land. A government may embark on a
program to link protected areas with rural development but not set aside funds to
continue the program once the initial project money has run out.

Effects of Global Trading Systems

The world economy's reliance on trade has greatly increased pressures to build national
economics based on comparative advantage and specialization. In developing countries,
which rely heavily on agricultural commodities for export earnings, those pressures have
pushed farmers toward large-scale plantations growing a relatively narrow range of crops
that are in demand on world markets—coffee, cocoa, and bananas, for example. As the
number of crop species declines, so too does the complex system of supporting species—
pollinators, seed dispensers, etc.—that evolved with traditional agricultural systems.
The growth of such farming systems has often been at the expense of species-rich
forests, wetlands, and diverse small-scale agricultural lands. In the process, the
cultivation of better-adapted local varieties for more predictable local markets has been
abandoned and much local knowledge lost.

Inequity of Resource Distribution

People who depend on the bounty provided by land and biotic resources have a strong
interest in maintaining the productivity of those resources. But local communities often
do not control such resources, have little say in their management, and must pay the costs
for their unsustainable use. Inequities in who manages resources versus who receives
their benefits can be found between rich and poor, men and women, and among various
ethinc groups.
Globally, there are inequities between richer countries with the technological and
financial capacity to develop and exploit natural resources and the poorer countries
where the resources exist. For example, a successful drug for childhood leukemia has
been developed from the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar, but none of the $100 million
annual estimated revenue has flowed to its country of origin. Most developing countries
also are heavily burdened by debt to industrialized countries, which limits their ability to
invest in conserving their own resources.

Failure to Account for the Value of Biodiversity

Markets tend to undervalue biodiversity, thereby promoting (directly or indirectly) its
depletion. Ironically, biodiversity produces and supports immense benefits to society, but
it is all most totally ignored in national economic accounts because it is so difficult to
value. When markets undervalue biodiversity, policies and subsidies may encourage
unsustainable or destructive activities. For example, Indonesia has subsidized the use of
pesticides in an effort to boost yields, but the resulting poisoning caused the loss of
beneficial insect predators and various species of fish, in addition to the loss of human
life. In other countries, subsidized irrigation has discouraged farmers from adopting what
would otherwise be practical and economical water conservation measures.
When property rights are uncertain, there are few in centives for sustainable use
by tenants. Research has shown that people are more likely to use land sustainable if they
are confident that they will continue to have access to that land in the future. Their good
land stewardship can help preserve species diversity.

Interaction of Root Causes

The root causes described above do not operate in isolation, but rather tend to act with
and exacerbate one another. For example, the global market demand for shrimp
encourages national governments to create policies and subsidies for private businessmen
to invest in shrimp ponds. In Asia, the production of cultivated shrimp in 1990 was
nearly seven times that of 1982.
The environmental costs of this growth, particularly in the razing of coastal
mangrove forests to build the ponds, have been high. The islands of the Philippines have
lost about 70 percent of their coastal mangrove forests, mostly in the past 15 years. As a
result, many of the valuable ecological functions provided by mangroves—as nurseries
and shelters for many commercially important fish, as buffer zones against destructive
wind and wave action, and as natural water purification areas–are lost. In addition, the
shrimp ponds cause excessive fresh water withdrawal as well as pollution (excess lime,
organic wastes, pesticides, chemical, and disease organisms) that is flushed into
adjoining mangroves. Meanwhile, the costs of this habitat loss are borne by local people
who depend on the mangrove ecosystems for fish protein, revenue, and forest materials.