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BIODIVERSITY-EUROPE: Not Just About a Frog Here or There
By 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." (END)
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