by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 15, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
In 48 years wildlife populations in the tropics, the region that holds the bulk of the world’s biodiversity, have fallen by an alarming 61 percent, according to the most recent update to the Living Planet Index. Produced by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the index currently tracks almost 10,000 populations of 2,688 vertebrate species (including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish) in both the tropics and temperate regions.
“Much as a stock market index measures the state of the market by tracking changes in […] a selection of companies, changes in abundance (i.e., the total number of individuals in a given population) across a selection of species can be used as one important indicator of the planet’s ecological condition,” the report reads.
Between 1970 to 2008, species abundance in the tropics fell by 44 percent on land, 62 percent in the oceans, and 70 percent in freshwater environments, culminating in an average loss of 1.25 percent every year since the baseline was set in 1970. Wildlife populations are declining due to a number of large-scale human impacts including ongoing deforestation, habitat degradation, overexploitation for food or medicine, pollution, agricultural, overfishing, invasive species, disease, climate change, dams, mining, and other industrial projects.
The report also examines impacts in particular regions. Wildlife populations in tropical Africa have dropped by 38 percent, by half in the Neotropics (Central and South America) by half, and by 64 percent in the Indo-Pacific (including India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Pacific Islands). This is perhaps not surprising since the world’s highest deforestation levels are in Southeast Asia.”These declines reflect large-scale forest and other habitat loss across these realms, driven by logging, growing human populations, and agricultural, industrial and urban developments,” the report reads.In the Neotropics, recent years have seen amphibians decimated by a fungal disease. The disease, known as chytridiomycosis, is not only cutting populations down but also pushing dozens of species to extinction.
“This report is like a planetary check-up and the results indicate we have a very sick planet. Ignoring this diagnosis will have major implications for humanity. We can restore the planet’s health, but only through addressing the root causes, population growth and over-consumption of resources,” Jonathan Baillie, conservation program director with the Zoological Society of London said in a press release.
Biodiversity provides many services to global society, including pollination, carbon sequestration, food production, soil health, and life-saving medicines among others, although few of these ‘ecosystem services’ are yet recognized by the global market.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 1, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Six years after the Yangtze river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), or baiji, was declared “functionally extinct” by scientists, another marine mammal appears on the edge of extinction in China’s hugely degraded Yangtze River. In less than two months, 32 Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis), a subspecies of the finless porpoise, have been found dead in Dongting and Poyang Lakes in the Yangtze, reports the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
The porpoises are suffering from many of the same impacts that pushed the baiji to extinction: illegal electrofishing, strikes by boat propellors, poisons, and possibly pollution and food shortages from lower water levels linked by officials to climate change. Autopsies show that at least two of the animals were killed by electrofishing and boat propellers.
“This tragedy shows that Yangtze finless porpoise is facing enormous challenges,” Lei Gang, head of WWF China’s Central Yangtze program, said in a press release. “The porpoise deaths illustrates that without effective measures to fundamentally reverse the trend of ecological deterioration, future of the incredible creature is far from certain. We have to act immediately.”
Researchers believe that around 1,000 Yangtze finless porpoises survive in the river with the population in dramatic decline. Currently, the IUCN Red List is evaluating the subspecies to see if the situation warrants classifying the population as Critically Endangered.
Breakneck development, including a series of dams, with little environmental regard has left the ecology of the Yangtze River in shambles. Aside from the baiji’s extinction, many of the river’s key species are vanishing. The Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius), arguably the world’s biggest freshwater fish, is listed as Critically Endangered with only two fish confirmed since 2002. Scientists fear the fish may be soon gone for good, if not already, after a 2009 survey couldn’t find a single fish. In addition the Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis), the Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus), and the Yangtze soft-shell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) are all listed as Critically Endangered.
Still, a controversial new hydroelectric project, the Xiaonanhai Dam, is moving ahead despite concerns that it will finish off a number of the river’s endangered fish, many found no-where else in the world.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 6, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Imagine an international mega-deal. The global organic food industry agrees to support international agribusiness in clearing as much tropical rainforest as they want for farming. In return, agribusiness agrees to farm the now-deforested land using organic methods, and the organic industry encourages its supporters to buy the resulting timber and food under the newly devised “Rainforest Plus” label. There would surely be an international outcry.
Virtually unnoticed, however, even by their own membership, the world’s biggest wildlife conservation groups have agreed to exactly such a scenario, only in reverse. Led by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, still known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States), many of the biggest conservation nonprofits including Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy have already agreed to a series of global bargains with international agribusiness. In exchange for vague promises of habitat protection, sustainability, and social justice, these conservation groups are offering to greenwash industrial commodity agriculture.
The big conservation nonprofits don’t see it that way of course.
According to WWF’s “Vice President for Market Transformation” Jason Clay, the new conservation strategy arose from two fundamental realizations.
The first was that agriculture and food production are the key drivers of almost every environmental concern. From issues as diverse as habitat destruction to over-use of water, from climate change to ocean dead zones, agriculture and food production are globally the primary culprits. To take one example, 80-90% of all fresh water extracted by humans is for agriculture, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s “State of the World’s Land and Water” report. This point was emphasized once again in a recent analysis published in the scientific journal Nature. The lead author of this study was Professor Jonathan Foley. Not only is Foley the director of the University of Minnesota-based Institute on the Environment, but he is also a science board member of the Nature Conservancy.
The second crucial realization for WWF was that forest destroyers typically are not peasants with machetes but national and international agribusinesses with bulldozers. It is the latter who deforest tens of thousands of acres at a time. Land clearance on this scale is an ecological disaster, but Claire Robinson of Earth Open Source points out it is also “incredibly socially destructive,” as peasants are driven off their land and communities are destroyed. According to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 60 million people worldwide risk losing their land and means of subsistence from palm plantations. By about 2004, WWF had come to recognize the true impacts of industrial agriculture. Instead of informing their membership and initiating protests and boycotts, however, they embarked on a partnership strategy they call “market transformation.”
Market Transformation
With WWF leading the way, the conservation nonprofits have negotiated approval schemes for “Responsible” and “Sustainable” farmed commodity crops. According to WWF’s Clay, the plan is to have agribusinesses sign up to reduce the 4-6 most serious negative impacts of each commodity crop by 70-80%. And if enough growers and suppliers sign up, then the Indonesian rainforests or the Brazilian Cerrado will be saved.
The ambition of market transformation is on a grand scale. There are schemes for palm oil (the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; RSPO), soybeans (the Round Table on Responsible Soy; RTRS), biofuels (the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels), Sugar (Bonsucro) and also for cotton, shrimp, cocoa and farmed salmon. These are markets each worth many billions of dollars annually and the intention is for these new “Responsible” and “Sustainable” certified products to dominate them.
The reward for producers and supermarkets will be that, reinforced on every shopping trip, “Responsible” and “Sustainable” logos and marketing can be expected to have major effects on public perception of the global food supply chain. And the ultimate goal is that, if these schemes are successful, human rights, critical habitats, and global sustainability will receive a huge and globally significant boost.
The role of WWF and other nonprofits in these schemes is to offer their knowledge to negotiate standards, to provide credibility, and to lubricate entry of certified products into international markets. On its UK website, for example, WWF offers its members the chance to “Save the Cerrado” by emailing supermarkets to buy “Responsible Soy.” What WWF argues will be a major leap forward in environmental and social responsibility has already started. “Sustainable” and “Responsible” products are already entering global supply chains.
Read more from TruthOut: http://www.truth-out.org/way-beyond-greenwashing-have-corporations-captured-big-conservation/1331048650
