| inbluevt | Date: Wednesday, 2013/09/11, 0:10 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, northern Peru and the Caribbean islands are areas that need urgent protection in order to achieve the global biodiversity conservation targets set for 2020, a new study shows.
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 10 2013 (IPS) - A team of scientists who analysed the richness of plant species around the world concluded that the ecosystems in need of immediate protection
in order to meet the 2020 conservation goals set by the Convention on Biological Diversity are largely concentrated in Latin America.
Humanity’s life support system, which provides our air, water and food, is powered by 8.7 million different kinds of plants, animals and other living species. But those species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, representing a major threat to future human survival.Recognising this threat, nearly every country in the world has agreed under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to protect 17 percent of the planet’s land areas and conserve 60 percent of the world’s plant species by the year 2020.
These twin goals, included in the 20 Aichi Targets, can only be achieved if far more land in the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America is properly protected, according to a new study published Sep. 6 in the journal Science.
The study, “Achieving the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Goals for Plant Conservation”, analysed the distribution of 110,000 different plant species to discover that about 67 percent the world’s plants live in 17 percent of the planet’s land area – mainly in tropical and subtropical regions.
“Our paper sets out the priority areas for protection, based on their species richness,” said report co-author Stuart Pimm from Duke University, in the eastern U.S. state of North Carolina.
Those priority areas include Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, northern Peru and the Caribbean islands, Pimm told Tierramérica*.
Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 endemic species, found nowhere else in the world. Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area than the small Central American nation, has only about 70 unique or endemic species scattered across its nine million square kilometres of land area.
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A family travelling by boat along the San Juan River, a biodiversity-rich area on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS
Message edited by inbluevt - Wednesday, 2013/09/11, 0:13 AM |
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