ENVIRONMENT-BIODIVERSITY: A New Atlas Maps the Way

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Aug 2 2002 (IPS) - What a map can mean to knowing a city, a new World Atlas of Biodiversity hopes to become for ecosystems around the world.

The new Atlas released this week in London maps the state of ecosystems around the world. With a picture of what’s where, the atlas points to ways that ecosystems can “prevent poverty and deliver prosperity.”

The atlas is the first comprehensive map-based view of global biodiversity. But the atlas produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) charts not only the existence of biodiversity, but also the interdependence of ecosystems.

“Biodiversity is more than information about species and habitats,” Mark Collins, UNEP-WCMC director said at the launch of the atlas Thursday. “We are talking here of ecosystem processes that link all these together.”

The atlas provides a wealth of facts and figures on the importance of forests, wetlands, marine and coastal environments and other key ecosystems. The 340-page atlas includes 68 diagrams and tables, and six appendices running into 115 pages that give detailed country-wise information. Information will be updated on an accompanying website (www.unep-wcmc.org).

The atlas is not aimed only at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD)due to begin in Johannesburg later this month, said Collins. “But we would like to get political wording to encourage some of the things we are saying,” he said. “We would like to find multilateral ways of getting this message across.”

The biodiversity atlas is intended to become standard undergraduate text, Collins said. And the information in the atlas could become “the basis to set policies,” he said. Together, Collins said “we hope this will have an impact in years to come.” The atlas is being presented as the “first map-based view, which sets the baseline for the living world in the 21st century.”

After presenting comprehensive date, the atlas offers some solutions in the final chapter to the problems that the data points to. The recommendations are chiefly along three lines: one, that the many international regulations already in place should be implemented, second, that the development aid process must become sustainable, and finally, a new focus on protected areas.

“Protected areas are not just places locked up behind fences,” Collins said. The number of protected areas has increased but they are not being managed effectively enough for biodiversity, Collins said.

In what it calls a “bleak scenario”, the atlas points out that “biodiversity will be threatened on almost 72 per cent of the land area by 2032.” The atlas reveals that losses of biodiversity will be particularly severe in South East Asia, the Congo Basin and in parts of the Amazon.

The atlas says: “As much as 48 per cent of these areas will become converted to agricultural land, plantations and urban areas, compared with 22 per cent today, suggesting wide depletions of biodiversity.”

UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer said “humankind now diverts about 40 per cent of the earth’s productivity to its own ends, much of this is being carried out in a destructive and unsustainable way,” he said. The value of wild resources to the pharmaceutical industry alone highlights the need for new and imaginative ways to exploit plants and animals, he said.

The atlas points out that 80 per cent of people in developing countries rely on medicines based largely on plants and animals. In the U.S. alone, 56 per cent of the top 150 prescribed drugs valued at 80 billion dollars are linked with discoveries made in the wild.

Toepfer said: “We must address the issue of genetic resource sharing by giving developing countries, where the majority of biodiversity remains, an economic incentive to protect wildlife by paying them properly for the plants and animals whose genes get used in new drugs or crops.”

Brian Groombbridge, co-author of the atlas said: “There is little true wilderness left to support the expansion of the human population on this planet. Over the last decade food supply has increased to meet the growing population through higher productivity (69 per cent) and exploitation of wilderness (31 per cent). But, with little wilderness area left, where will the additional capacity come from?”

The atlas provides vivid maps of these and other scenarios. The maps highlight areas that are particularly rich or particularly vulnerable. The atlas highlights fresh water sources, for instance, which it shows to be now less than one per cent of the world’s water resource. The maps show where the sources for life are, and where the dangers lie.

But the maps do not just show pictures of doom, said Collins. “Give nature half a chance and it will come back,” he said. The atlas, he said, is a tool to help “the public and decision-makers give it that half a chance that it needs.”