Guest guest Posted September 30, 2003 Report Share Posted September 30, 2003 ***************************Advertisement*************************** eCentral - Your Entertainment Guide http://www.star-ecentral.com ***************************************************************** This message was forwarded to you by yitzeling. Comment from sender: This article is from The Star Online (http://thestar.com.my) URL: http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2003/9/30/features/6334543 & sec=f\ eatures ________________________ Tuesday September 30, 2003 Turning point for Mother Earth? By HILARY CHIEW THE number of protected areas (PAs) ballooned to 102,102 sites this year compared with 12,754 sites in 1997. An area greater than the combined land mass of China, South Asia and Southeast Asia covering 18.1 million sqkm or 12.6% of the Earth’s land surface is accorded varying degrees of formal protection status. As the 3,000 delegates left the 10-day 5th World Park Congress (WPC) held in Durban from Sept 8 to 17 with reports of enlarged parks, announcement of new initiatives and increased engagement of the private sector and governments, their spirits must have lifted. Three countries in particular appropriately picked the once-a-decade assembly of resource managers, conservationists, scientists, civil servants and community leaders to declare their commitment to protect earth’s shrinking natural treasures. Madagascar pledged to triple the total area of protection from 1.7 million ha to six million ha in the next five years, Brazil declared six new PAs and the creation of a 10 million ha biodiversity corridor covering 71% of the state of Amapa while Senegal announced four new marine protected areas. And Africa, the continent that is synonymous with the safari, launched the Africa Protected Areas Initiative, a major programme to develop a well-designed and managed system of PAs that aims to meet the environmental and social needs of its people. More than 200 discussions were held during the congress organised by the International Union of Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) culminating in the Durban Accord, a 14-key target Action Plan, a set of 32 specific recommendations and a message to the 7th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in Kuala Lumpur in February. Though not legally binding, the Accord and Action Plan, a technical document that aims to provide policy-makers with key targets and timetables, seeks to lead the PA agenda through the next decade. “Nations the world over have adhered to the overarching agenda set in Caracas, Venezuela, at the previous World Park Congress and many targets set then have been attained and surpassed. The fact that more than 10% of the globe’s surface is protected illustrates the commitment carried forward by such events. Today’s agenda recognises the benefits and ensures that they are equitably shared. In 2013, we will be able to look back and hopefully be proud of our new achievements,” says Dr Kenton Miller, chairman of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA). Indeed the movement has come a long way from its first meeting in 1962 when about 1,000 sites were recorded besides surpassing the 10% target set in 1982 to protect critical ecosystems such as tropical forests, temperate forests and mixed island ecosystems notwithstanding the fact that biomes like lake systems and temperate grassland still fall short of the target. And the notion that no benefits should be derived from the parks had slowly been discarded and replaced with one that sought to promote the importance and value of PAs to societies. South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa summed up the progress of the PAs development neatly when he said the movement had steered towards a middle ground, away from two polarised extremes. “On one hand, there were those who supported the plunder of natural resources for short-term gains while others sought to place natural refuges beyond the reach of most human beings,” he said of the two impractical approaches. Responding to its theme Benefits Beyond Boundaries, the congress recognised that PAs cannot remain in isolation from the surrounding areas of land and sea, and from the communities and economic activities in and around them – a turning point for the role and placing of PAs in the sustainable and biodiversity agendas. Often seen as “islands of conservation in an ocean of destruction”, PAs are now considered as “islands of biodiversity protection” in an ocean of human development. The congress noted that there is little recognition of the crucial role of PAs in safeguarding species, food, water and climate stabiliser; rather, too many key stakeholders see PAs as a barrier to their activities. The theme is also very relevant in the global arena as the effects of environmental degradation have the potential to spill over geo-political borders. For instance, deforestation will not only deprive one nation of its biodiversity but it would also mean the shrinking of the planet’s carbon sink, a major contention of the global climate change negotiation. To recognise the efforts made by many countries to establish PAs, the WCPA decided to include all PAs regardless of size or whether they have been assigned any of the six IUCN categories in its 13th edition of the UN List of Protected Areas. This is because even small areas can play a significant role in conservation especially in the context of bioregional planning approaches. Out of the 102,102 sites, 33,036 PAs are without IUCN categories and cover 3.6 million sqkm – a significant proportion of the global conservation estate. <b>New challenges</b> Delegates voiced their concerns in the Durban Accord over the under-representation of freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems. Only 1% of the oceans, seas and coasts has protected status, exposing fisheries and rich storehouses of biodiverstiy to over-exploitation. Accounting for 9% of the world’s PAs or 1.7million sqkm, the largest marine PA is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia measuring 345,400 sqkm. The common assumption that living marine resources are inexhaustible has been proven incorrect, they said, hence calling for the urgent realisation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development Joint Plan of Implementation to establish a global system of effectively managing a representative network of marine protected areas by 2012 that includes within its scope the world’s oceans and seas beyond national jurisdictions, consistent with international law. Marine conservationists also call on the United Nations General Assembly to consider a resolution on an immediate moratorium on deep sea trawling in high seas until legally binding international conservation measures to protect the areas are in place. Despite the significant protection of terrestrial ecosystems, not all the PAs are being managed in a desirable manner. Many are nothing more than “paper parks” where extraction of their flora and fauna are rampant, creating the empty forest syndrome. IUCN director-general Achim Steiner admits the problem but said: “It is not a sign of failure but you must not get stuck in this state,” adding that creation of a park is a significant step towards protection. The Action Plan points out that to achieve complete global representation of ecoregions in PA, there needs to be particular emphasis on filling gaps in the global PA system with new PAs and more effective existing PAs where there is high irreplaceability and imminent threat. “New analyses presented at this Congress have shown that the global PA network is far from finished, with significant gaps in the coverage of PA systems for threatened species, globally important sites, habitats and realms. These gaps and changes require the expansion of existing PAs and the strategic creation of new PAs, while ensuring the connectivity of suitable habitat between them,” said the plan. It also maintains that PAs are vital to the CBD’s ambitious goal of achieving by 2010 “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiverstiy loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on earth”. It says threatened species, particularly those listed in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, could be effectively conserved in the network of effectively managed PAs. The Action Plan calls for the effective in situ conservation of: all critically endangered and endangered species globally confined to single sites by 2006; all other globally critically endangered and endangered species by 2008; and all other globally threatened species by 2010. IUCN Red List defines critically endangered and endangered as species facing very high risk of extinction in the immediate future; while threatened refers to species that face high risk of extinction in the near future. The menace of invasive alien species was also highlighted at the Congress, calling for solutions to the problem to be integrated into PA management programmes. The meeting cautioned that lack of recognition for the issue would have serious implications for biodiversity, adding that invasion into marine and terrestrial PAs must be addressed. <b>Money matters</b> For PAs to meet their biodiversity conservation and economic development objectives, they must receive adequate financial support. However, it is noted that many countries with the highest levels of biodiversity are challenged by inadequate financial means. These countries compromise on creating or effectively managing a comprehensive and effective PA system even when it is not in the national interest. A mere 20% of the estimated US$20bil (RM76bil) to US$30bil (RM114bil) annually required to establish and maintain a comprehensive PA system, including terrestrial, wetland and marine ecosystems is met. The significant funding gap means that PA managers are being increasingly required to devote resources to raise their own funding and the PAs are facing greater degradation. In presenting the workshop outcome, vice chair of WCPA Dr Mohamed I. Bakarr revealed that out of the US$6.5bil (RM24.7bil) available over the last 10 years, 15% was spent in the tropic region that shelter more than half of the world’s 12 mega-biodiversity hotspots – a glaring inequitable distribution of funding. He said the figure need to be raised to US$15bil (RM57bil) over the next five years to achieve the objectives of the PAs to continue providing socio-economic services to communities in and surrounding these ecosystems. The Action Plan requests the Global Environment Facility to commit a substantial increase in funding for PAs in its next replenishment. <b>Forging partnerships</b> While tourism had been seen as a supporting force behind the creation of these PAs particularly in impoverished societies, in some instances it had become a destructive force – contributing to the deterioration of cultural landscapes, threatening biodiversity, causing pollution, disrupting social systems and increasing poverty. Heading the Sustainable Development of Tourism of the World Tourism Organisation, Eugenio Yunis admitted that tourism had mushroomed without consideration for conservation. He said there is a need for national policies to regulate tourism activities based on universal guidelines such as the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism and the IUCN’s Sustainable Tourism in Protected Areas: Guidelines for Planning and Management. Nonetheless, the industry provides employment to an unskilled workforce, a critical factor in poverty alleviation that will reduce the pressure on natural resources and support the conservation of PAs. The role of a government cannot be understated and the world has probably found one such conscientious government in Costa Rica which took the bold step to ban mining. “We made the brave decision and applied the precautionary principles. The Government has a big share in biodiversity and it should assume the responsibilities (in managing the resources),” Yunis said at a plenary session on Global Partners for Protected Areas: Extractive Industries and Protected Areas. “The value of biodiversity is higher than gold or oil,” asserts the Latin American nation Minister for Environment and Energy Carlos Manuel Rodriguez. Not to be outshined, host country South Africa announced a new property rates bill that will exempt all formal PAs from land taxes. The government is also teaming up with private land-owners to bring private conservation land under government protection. This will bring the amount of conservation land in South Africa from the current 6.6% to over 10%. In addition, five new parks measuring 130,000ha have been earmarked for preservation. A significant breakthrough of the Congress was in bringing hard-nosed mining businesses to the negotiation table to address the damaging impact of their operations in PAs both to the environment and the local communities, particularly indigenous peoples. However, there still remained considerable areas of disagreement on a way forward and there are still concerns that the IUCN dialogue with the International Council on Mining and Metals would turn into a vehicle to compromise conservation efforts. IUCN councillor Christine Milne reckoned that the objective of the mining industry and the conservation community differs greatly. She dismissed the notion that the industry provides employment to locals and criticised its failure to acknowledge alternative sources of energy in the broader climatic change agenda. “Trust is not built by talking, trust is built by action,” she asserts. She questioned the sincerity of the industry which had continued to defy the ban on mining exploration and extraction in category I to IV of the IUCN PAs list. At least 44 World Heritage sites have been affected by extractive industries such as the Yellowstone National Park in the United States which has gold deposits and Kakadu National Park in Australia which has uranium. The road ahead in this difficult dialogue is certainly rocky as underscored by the call for review of the IUCN categories by ICMM president Sir Robert Wilson as “it has become increasingly difficult for the industry to work” amidst criticisms that it is flouting national laws governing good practices. Nonetheless, IUCN’s senior advisor on World Heritage Prof Adrian Phillips opined that the legacy of mistrust had to be discarded to find common grounds through the initiative of multi-stakeholder forums to achieve consensus on “no-go” zones for mining, on a case-by-case basis, giving priority to World Heritage sites. <p> ________________________ Your one-stop information portal: The Star Online http://thestar.com.my http://biz.thestar.com.my http://classifieds.thestar.com.my http://cards.thestar.com.my http://search.thestar.com.my http://star-motoring.com http://star-space.com http://star-jobs.com http://star-ecentral.com http://star-techcentral.com 1995-2003 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Star Publications is prohibited. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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