By Daniel Ooko
NAIROBI, May 6 (Xinhua) -- The UN Environment Program (UNEP) has lauded efforts being spearheaded by China to stem a rapid decline in biodiversity that is now threatening extinction for almost half the world's coral reef species.
UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said China is among the six countries in the world with the highest increase in land being converted or in the process of being converted to organic agriculture - up 300,000 hectares between 2007 and 2008. "However, there is a growing recognition in the country on the important link between biodiversity and the economy," Nuttal told Xinhua in an emailed interview.
Many experts reckon the world will fail to meet the goal set by world leaders at an Earth Summit in 2002 of a "significant reduction" by 2010 in the rate of species losses.
Apart from China's well known efforts to conserve the panda, Nuttall said the country's forestry efforts have played a regional and global role in addressing the decline of forests and thus forest biodiversity. "China is, like all countries around the world, struggling to reverse the rate of loss of biodiversity. Between 2000 and 2010, Asia had a net gain in forests very much due to China's efforts," Nuttall said, noting that the Asian nation is also engaging on big, transboundary biodiversity projects.
Nuttall said the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) pointed China has being a country with a large number of threatened species: 800 in all and including the internationally iconic Yangtze river dolphin.
He said an international effort involving UNEP to save the Siberian Crane - one of the world's most endangered birds that migrates 5,000 km from Siberia to southern Iran and China - has been boosted the conservation and rehabilitation of some 7,000 km of wetlands including at Poyang Lake Basin, southern China and on the northeastern China Songnen Plain.
He said Climate change represented an over-arching challenge with many species at risk of decline and even extinction as climates across the world change. "But climate change, in terms of an international response, can also assist. In Copenhagen, at the recent UN climate convention meeting, governments gave the green light to Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD)," he said.
Environmentalists say global warming, blamed mainly on human use of fossil fuels, will wreck habitats by drying out the Amazon rainforest, for instance, or by melting polar ice.
The World Conservation Union also said that one in every six land mammals in Europe was under threat of extinction, including the Iberian lynx, Arctic fox and the Mediterranean monk seal.
Nuttall said paying developed countries not to cut their trees down because deforestation now accounts for close to 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
Such payments, which now need to be forthcoming from developed economies, could also help secure the future of many forest-living species if carefully tailored and implemented, he said.
According to Nuttal, Africa is, like all continents and countries also struggling to better manage its natural and nature- based assets.
Nevertheless, he said, there are many success stories which if embedded and taken up more widely could boost the prospects for a sustainable future.
Nuttall said pioneering efforts are underway in Kenya to restore and rehabilitate the Mau forest complex - the largest closed canopy forest in the region which is also the water tower for some of the country's major river systems. "Some of the greatest increases in recent decades of protected area listings have happened on this continent," he said. "In Mali, the government there in partnership with UNEP is undertaking a restoration of a lake that has disappeared -- Lake Faguibine -- with important ramifications for migratory birds and also 200,000 nomadic people."
According to Nuttall, Working with Water, a government-backed NGO in South Africa is paying unemployed people to assist in removing 'alien' trees that are invading its famous Cape Floral Kingdom and river systems. "The wood is to be used to fuel power stations in order to reduce dependency on coal and cut greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania are three countries with some of the highest numbers of workers in organic food production and farming." "A country like the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the pilot countries preparing itself to be part of the REDD program and a country such as Kenya is also studying how its forests could be part of the climate change solution with implications for biodiversity," he said.
Increasingly scientists and policymakers have underlined the link of biodiversity preservation to the economy.
A rich biodiversity provides a number of environmental services, such as pollination, food security, pest control, freshwater, medical breakthroughs, and carbon sequestration.
In 2002 nations pledged that by this year they would achieve a 'significant reduction' in biodiversity loss.
According to experts, the international community has failed: if anything the extinction crisis today is worse than it was eight years ago.
Extinctions are estimated to be occurring at 1,000 times the natural background rate, and many ecologists believe we are entering a period of global mass extinction similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs - only this time the cause is not otherworldly, like a comet, but due to human impacts.
