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    Conserving Biodiversity How Much Neccesery

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    kedar karki
    Population growth and increasing consumption are major root causes of biodiversity loss. As the global population increases and consumes more resources, there is more pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land. Additionally, increased pollution harms habitats and wildlife. Other root causes include ignorance about ecosystems and species, poorly conceived government policies, effects of global trade systems that prioritize monocropping, inequity in resource distribution, and failure to account for biodiversity's value in economic systems. These root causes often interact and exacerbate one another.

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    Conserving Biodiversity How Much Neccesery

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    kedar karki
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    Population growth and increasing consumption are major root causes of biodiversity loss. As the global population increases and consumes more resources, there is more pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land. Additionally, increased pollution harms habitats and wildlife. Other root causes include ignorance about ecosystems and species, poorly conceived government policies, effects of global trade systems that prioritize monocropping, inequity in resource distribution, and failure to account for biodiversity's value in economic systems. These root causes often interact and exacerbate one another.

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    CONSERVING BIODIVERSITY HOW MUCH NECCESERY

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    Population growth and increasing consumption are major root causes of biodiversity loss. As the global population increases and consumes more resources, there is more pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land. Additionally, increased pollution harms habitats and wildlife. Other root causes include ignorance about ecosystems and species, poorly conceived government policies, effects of global trade systems that prioritize monocropping, inequity in resource distribution, and failure to account for biodiversity's value in economic systems. These root causes often interact and exacerbate one another.

    Copyright:

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    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    190 views3 pages

    Conserving Biodiversity How Much Neccesery

    Uploaded by

    kedar karki
    Population growth and increasing consumption are major root causes of biodiversity loss. As the global population increases and consumes more resources, there is more pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land. Additionally, increased pollution harms habitats and wildlife. Other root causes include ignorance about ecosystems and species, poorly conceived government policies, effects of global trade systems that prioritize monocropping, inequity in resource distribution, and failure to account for biodiversity's value in economic systems. These root causes often interact and exacerbate one another.

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    of 3

    CONSERVING BIODIVERSITY HOW MUCH NECCESERY ?

    -Dr. Kedar Karki


    M.V.St.Preventive Medicine

    Introduction:
    The conventional approach to preserving biodiversity has emphasized the
    creation of parks and preserves, plus offsite conservation facilities such as zoos and
    botanical gardens. This approach has helped sustain many species, and it can mitigate
    some of the effects of threats such as habitat loss, overexploitation of plant and animal
    species, air and water pollution, the introduction of nonnative species, large-scale
    agriculture and forestry, and global climate change. Yet many such efforts do not address
    the root causes of biodiversity loss. The Global Biodiversity Strategy has identified
    several of these root causes: burgeoning human populations, increasing consumption of
    resources, ignorance about species and ecosystems, poorly conceived policies, and
    economic causes such as the effects of global trading systems, inequity in resource
    distribution, and the failure of economic systems to account for the value of biological
    resources. Many of these root causes occur simultaneously and are intricately connected.

    ROOT CAUSES OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS


    Population Growth and Increasing Resource Consumption
    The world's population has more than tripled in the 20th Century, and continued growth is
    assured over the next 50 years, especially in the developing countries. Humankind's
    burgeoning numbers have an increasingly voracious appetite: people use or destroy about
    40 percent of the net primary productivity of terrestrial and aquatic plants. At the present
    pace, the Earth's renewable resources are rapidly being depleted: the probable doubling
    of the world's population over the next 50 years will greatly increase these pressures.
    The issue of population is not only a matter of numbers, but also of patterns and
    levels of resource consumption. The average resident of and industrialized nation uses 15
    times as much paper, 10 times as much steel, and 12 times as much fuel as a person in a
    developing country
    Population growth and increasing resource consumption affect biodiversity in two
    ways: they create pressure to convert wildlife habitat into agricultural and urban land,
    and they produce wastes that pollute habitat and poison wildlife. These trends can be
    offset by stabilizing populations, using resources more efficiently, recycling, and
    controlling pollution.

    Ignorance About Species and Ecosystems


    Knowledge about the world's life forms lags surprisingly far behind other fields of
    scientific inquiry. While a great deal is known about individual species of birds, fishes,
    mammals, and plants, fewer than 1.4 million of the structure and functioning of
    ecosystems is just as scant.
    Information is also limited on the condition and value of biological resources, as
    will as uses and management techniques employed by traditional cultures over the
    centuries. For example, residents of one forest village in Thailand eat 295 different local
    plants and use another 119 for medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that
    3,00 plant species are used for birth control by tribal people around the world. This
    knowledge is rapidly disappearing along with the indigenous tribes that possess it. Over
    6 million tribal people lived in the Amazon basin 500 years ago: today there are only
    about 200,000. Compounding the problem is the lack of trained scientists and engineers
    in many of the developing countries where biodiversity loss is the most severe.

    Poorly Conceived Policies


    Government policies designed to encourage some sectors, such as agriculture of forestry,
    can have the side effect of destroying biodiversity. For example, policies that award titles
    to settlers who " improve" or clear the land can result in the destruction of biodiversity.
    In Botswana, the government provides full cash subsidies for farmers to clear, plow,
    seed, and fence up to 10 hectares for cultivation. Modern land laws are generally
    incompatible with the few remaining community property systems, such as that of the
    Cree of Canada, in which hunting and gathering are strictly regulated for the long-term
    benefit of a group.
    Simple lack of coordination between government agencies with overlapping
    responsibilities may also result in loss of biodiversity. For example, an environmental
    agency may be charged with halting deforestation while the agriculture ministry tries to
    boost crop exports by subsidizing farmers to clear land. A government may embark on a
    program to link protected areas with rural development but not set aside funds to
    continue the program once the initial project money has run out.

    Effects of Global Trading Systems


    The world economy's reliance on trade has greatly increased pressures to build national
    economics based on comparative advantage and specialization. In developing countries,
    which rely heavily on agricultural commodities for export earnings, those pressures have
    pushed farmers toward large-scale plantations growing a relatively narrow range of crops
    that are in demand on world markets—coffee, cocoa, and bananas, for example. As the
    number of crop species declines, so too does the complex system of supporting species—
    pollinators, seed dispensers, etc.—that evolved with traditional agricultural systems.
    The growth of such farming systems has often been at the expense of species-rich
    forests, wetlands, and diverse small-scale agricultural lands. In the process, the
    cultivation of better-adapted local varieties for more predictable local markets has been
    abandoned and much local knowledge lost.

    Inequity of Resource Distribution


    People who depend on the bounty provided by land and biotic resources have a strong
    interest in maintaining the productivity of those resources. But local communities often
    do not control such resources, have little say in their management, and must pay the costs
    for their unsustainable use. Inequities in who manages resources versus who receives
    their benefits can be found between rich and poor, men and women, and among various
    ethinc groups.
    Globally, there are inequities between richer countries with the technological and
    financial capacity to develop and exploit natural resources and the poorer countries
    where the resources exist. For example, a successful drug for childhood leukemia has
    been developed from the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar, but none of the $100 million
    annual estimated revenue has flowed to its country of origin. Most developing countries
    also are heavily burdened by debt to industrialized countries, which limits their ability to
    invest in conserving their own resources.

    Failure to Account for the Value of Biodiversity


    Markets tend to undervalue biodiversity, thereby promoting (directly or indirectly) its
    depletion. Ironically, biodiversity produces and supports immense benefits to society, but
    it is all most totally ignored in national economic accounts because it is so difficult to
    value. When markets undervalue biodiversity, policies and subsidies may encourage
    unsustainable or destructive activities. For example, Indonesia has subsidized the use of
    pesticides in an effort to boost yields, but the resulting poisoning caused the loss of
    beneficial insect predators and various species of fish, in addition to the loss of human
    life. In other countries, subsidized irrigation has discouraged farmers from adopting what
    would otherwise be practical and economical water conservation measures.
    When property rights are uncertain, there are few in centives for sustainable use
    by tenants. Research has shown that people are more likely to use land sustainable if they
    are confident that they will continue to have access to that land in the future. Their good
    land stewardship can help preserve species diversity.

    Interaction of Root Causes


    The root causes described above do not operate in isolation, but rather tend to act with
    and exacerbate one another. For example, the global market demand for shrimp
    encourages national governments to create policies and subsidies for private businessmen
    to invest in shrimp ponds. In Asia, the production of cultivated shrimp in 1990 was
    nearly seven times that of 1982.
    The environmental costs of this growth, particularly in the razing of coastal
    mangrove forests to build the ponds, have been high. The islands of the Philippines have
    lost about 70 percent of their coastal mangrove forests, mostly in the past 15 years. As a
    result, many of the valuable ecological functions provided by mangroves—as nurseries
    and shelters for many commercially important fish, as buffer zones against destructive
    wind and wave action, and as natural water purification areas–are lost. In addition, the
    shrimp ponds cause excessive fresh water withdrawal as well as pollution (excess lime,
    organic wastes, pesticides, chemical, and disease organisms) that is flushed into
    adjoining mangroves. Meanwhile, the costs of this habitat loss are borne by local people
    who depend on the mangrove ecosystems for fish protein, revenue, and forest materials.

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