Biodiversity, Environment, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

BIODIVERSITY-EUROPE: Not Just About a Frog Here or There

Cillian Donnelly

BRUSSELS, May 27 2009 (IPS) - Politicians across the European Union are waking up to the fact that biodiversity is fast becoming a crucial environmental issue that needs to be tackled soon.

This change in attitude comes after a study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 59 percent of European amphibians and 42 percent of reptiles are in decline. A significant number of these are now on the European Red List, a table of species considered to be under severe threat of extinction.

Despite this grim news, European environmental NGOs remain optimistic that the decline can be halted given a new realisation amongst European policy makers that the upkeep of biodiversity needs to be seriously addressed.

The optimism prevails even though the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, is unsure how best to respond to the threat to European ecosystems.

The clear conclusion from reports highlighting the danger to biodiversity in Europe is that species and ecosystems will be lost, says Pieter de Pous of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a body that works closely with the Commission to best evaluate environmental legislation. But despite this, the Commission "still haven't made up their minds" about the best way forward.

The problem arises form "clashes between policy objectives" as individual Commission departments produce legislative proposals without due care given to policy integration," de Pous says. This means that often laws governing transport, agriculture and energy tend to be conceived in isolation, and sometimes they apparently contradict each other.


"We can avoid these problems with simple attention given to biodiversity," de Pous says. "For instance, there should be better impact assessments on major projects, such as highway construction – and they should actually be carried out.

"And in agriculture, it can be even simpler, with farmers given some form of compensation for allowing biodiversity to develop on their lands."

The Commission have taken on board some of the suggestions of the environmental lobby, but so far "have not been very explicit" in how they are going to deal with them specifically, de Pous says.

Despite this, "we are very optimistic that things will work out in the future," Andreas Baumuller, biodiversity policy officer at WWF told IPS.

"Before, there was no political will, and it was so difficult to explain the problem, there wasn't real interest." Now, Baumuller says, the environmental community have found a way to communicate effectively with politicians in a way they understand and can respond to; by explaining biodiversity (Baumuller prefers the simpler term "nature", as does Pieter de Pous) in relation to economics.

"When we explain it in this way, they take notice," he says. But he is quick to stress that WWF sees the value of biodiversity in many ways "but politicians only see things in economic terms."

Baumuller gives a simple example. "Look at mountain forests in the Alps. They help prevent avalanches. This is 100 times cheaper than building technical structures to do the same thing."

This shift to the economic argument has in part been inspired by a German government study on the economic significance of the global loss of biological diversity, proposed after the G8 conference in Potsdam in March 2007, and speeded up after the G8 Heiligendamm Summit the following June.

This momentum, which resulted in a top-level desire to analyse the "global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the cost of effective conservation", eventually led to The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) Report complied by Pavan Sukhdev, managing director and head of Deutsche Bank's global markets business in India, and founder-director of the Green Accounting for Indian Shares Trust (GIST).

But biodiversity is not simply a matter of preservation, says Andreas Baumuller. Contained within all ecosystems are benefits to humankind that need to be understood.

"There are two ways of looking at extinction. One is to understand that once we lose a species it is gone forever, that future generations cannot see or feel this part of nature. The other is to look at the strong link between ecosystems and the services they provide. Nature does give services to humans, whether we see it or not, for example, flood plains along the sides of rivers.

"What we have now is not simply a case of whether some frogs are here or not, we have to value the whole service. If you look at amphibians, they exist on wet plains, they are an indicator of whether or not a habitat is there, whether it's in danger or not."

This model of looking at the added value of biodiversity seems to be catching on. "The TEEB report has opened up the possibility that there is a better yardstick other than just ranking biodiversity in terms of how it will just affect the Gross Domestic Product. It says that GDP itself does not measure the true value of biodiversity, that social things have to be included too," says Baumuller.

He admits that some legislative initiatives in the past have "been a mistake", but sees the TEEB report, complied much along the same lines as the Stern report on climate change, as a potential force for global good.

"Next year is a big, big milestone for biodiversity," he says, referring to the final TEEB report. "We have to then hope that politics will be prepared to take up the challenge."

 
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