By Haider Rizvi
CURITIBA, Brazil, Mar 30 2006 (IPS)

While no government is disputing the idea that in order to protect biodiversity a universal index of all known species is needed, many wonder if such a task is possible without sufficient financial support from rich countries.

Though the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI) has been discussed in the past, the issue is back on the international agenda, taken up last week at the 8th meeting of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP8), running until Mar. 31 in this environmentally friendly city in southern Brazil.

Attending the meeting are environmental experts and officials from around the world, who seem poised to adopt the species inventory system for categorising by name thousands of plants and animals.

The GTI is the outcome of a series of discussions held in recent years, after the world community acknowledged that significant gaps existed in human knowledge about species and that there was a lack of expertise on biodiversity.

Following a lengthy discussion on GTI during the first days of the COP8, a working group of delegates decided to return to the negotiating table on Mar. 27, said UN officials, who expect a final agreement on the implementation when the next round of meetings is over.

“Yes, (an agreement) is possible,” Ryan Hill, a programme officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity (with the UN Environment Programme, UNEP), told Tierramérica.

“It’s a big issue for us because many developing countries do not have sufficient resources,” a delegate from Venezuela told Tierramérica, adding that at this stage no rich country has indicated any interest in taking responsibility for financial assistance.

Hill agreed, pointing out that at least 15 delegations from developing countries in various regions have raised the question of funding.

Delegates decided to move one step forward concerning the issue of resources by involving Bionet International, a not-for-profit organisation that is widely respected for its dedication to taxonomic research on species. Bionet is to be entrusted to establish a fund to assist in putting together catalogues of species. However, they doubt if that would be enough to achieve desirable results.

“This decision doesn’t put any particular responsibility on any country,” Hill said, explaining that countries could contribute to the fund whatever amount they liked, with no legal obligations.

Environmental experts and researchers warn that many species will remain at risk of extinction, which could lead to further ecological imbalance if knowledge about them is not made widely accessible.

“Taxonomic knowledge about many species is really missing,” Jeroen Huising, a tropical soil expert based in Kenya, told Tierramérica. “If we don’t know what’s there, if you can’t identify a species, then it’s very difficult to communicate.”

Huising, a project coordinator with the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), considers the lack of knowledge about species as a “global problem,” because a lot of people “are not very interested in taxonomy.”

Hill expressed a similar opinion, adding that he is concerned that the funding level in developing countries “is very slow.”

Official documents on the biodiversity agreement reflect that many wealthy nations are not spending as much money on streamlining information on species as they possibly could.

As a result, according to Hill, the number of taxonomists in the world is on a constant decline.

However, some European nations, especially Germany and Belgium, appear to have taken this issue seriously, he said.

Fatima Moreira, a researcher in biological sciences at the University of Lavras in Brazil and COP8 participant, seemed to be one expert who personally confronted the problem posed by the lack of knowledge about many living species.

She recently authored a book that explains how many species of microorganisms living in the soils have disappeared due to over-use of land for agriculture.

“We don’t know about 95 percent of the species living underground,” she said, “because we have no inventory on global biodiversity.”

“It’s sad that the media don’t pay attention to such issues,” she said, explaining that many soil microorganisms in the Amazon region are vital for maintaining ecological balance.

(*Haider Rizvi is a Tierramérica contributor. Originally published Mar. 25 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)

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