Science Matters: Birds do better when neighbours cooperate

[Guest guest]

Here's your weekly Science Matters column by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola.

Birds do better when neighbours cooperate

With so many bad news stories about the environment in the media, it's nice

to hear about good news for a change - especially when it relates to

international cooperation.

Having Mother Nature in front of the cameras again is a good thing.

Environmental problems finally aren't being swept under the rug as they often

were

for the past decade - they're making headline news. Most of these stories are

decidedly grim. But I think that one of the most challenging issues facing

humanity this century is not necessarily the problems themselves, but the

global

cooperation and communication it will take to solve them.

That's because so many of the environmental challenges we face today are

global in nature - climate change being the most obvious example. And there are

many others. Our planet is facing a biodiversity crisis too. We are losing

species at a rate similar to earlier mass extinction events like the demise of

the dinosaurs. Saving these creatures is often not a simple task because, as

with an issue like global warming, no individual municipality, province,

state or country can solve the problem on its own.

Many jurisdictions have attempted to do that using their own

species-protection laws, rules and regulations designed independently and in

isolation of

one another. However, a recent report published in the journal Science shows

that cross-boundary cooperation can be more effective for conservation than

individual jurisdictions trying to go it alone.

The report, written by a group of scientists with the Royal Society for the

Protection of Birds, used the European Union Council Directive on the

Conservation of Wild Birds as a test case. The Birds Directive was created in

1979

to build a framework, complete with objectives, which would help conserve all

birds throughout the European Union. It was then left to the individual E.U.

member states to decide how best to achieve the objectives.

Assessing the success of such programs is often difficult due to a lack of

data, but the authors of the report note that in this case they were fortunate

to have access to the results of several major inventories on the status and

population trends of virtually all of Europe's birds. This allowed them to

compare population trends both before and after the Birds Directive and

compare those with the population trends of neighbouring countries outside of

the

European Union and thus not subject to the Directive.

They found that birds listed under the Directive, such as the Eurasian

bittern, fared better than did birds that were not listed under the Directive.

Populations of bird species listed under the Directive also fared better in

member E.U. nations than they did in non-E.U. nations. This led the researchers

to conclude that the Birds Directive: " …has brought demonstrable benefits to

bird populations in the E.U. and that international policy intervention can be

effective in addressing conservation issues over large geographical areas. "

In other words, working cooperatively between nations to protect the birds

is effective - probably more effective - than individual countries working

completely on their own without such a framework to help guide them. This kind

of success shows how important cooperation is when dealing with environmental

problems. Multi-jurisdictional cooperation can have the best results if we

are willing to sit down and work out the details.Birds aren't the only creatures

that would benefit from such agreements. There are all sorts of wide-ranging

species, such as salmon, caribou and large carnivores - even trees and other

plants - whose habitats cross provincial, state or national boundaries. Many

of these species are also endangered and would benefit the most from

good-neighbour policies designed with conservation in mind. With proven success

stories like the Bird Directive, there's no longer any justification for acting

like nature ends at the nearest border.

Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at _www.davidsuzuki.org_

(http://www.davidsuzuki.org/) .