Biodiversity Experts Call for "One Clear Voice" to Advise Policymakers

Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News

July 20, 2006

With an increasing number of species threatened with extinction, a
coalition of scientists is calling for the world's experts to convene an
authoritative panel on diversity loss.

Leading experts from 13 countries signed a declaration, which appears in today's issue of the journal Nature, that says the biodiversity community must become more strongly integrated.

The declaration suggests that experts in the field take a cue from climate-change researchers and create an organization similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The United Nations group is widely recognized as a reliable source of information on global warming topics (related: global warming fast facts).

"For the sake of the planet, the biodiversity science community has to create a way to get organized," one of the authors, Robert Watson, said in a statement.

Watson is chief scientist at the World Bank Environment Department and a former chair of the IPCC.

The community should, with "one clear voice, advise governments on steps to halt the potentially catastrophic loss of species already occurring," he said.

"One-Stop Shopping"

Harold Mooney, a professor of environmental biology at Stanford University in California, also signed the declaration.

"Loss of biodiversity is a crisis that scientists have been trying to bring to the attention of the general public for quite a while," he said.

But the public, Mooney tells National Geographic News, isn't getting the message.

What is needed, he says, is an international scientific body that can identify what is known and what is uncertain and can authoritatively tell people what it all means.

"We've lacked that," Mooney said.

Mooney and his co-authors want to create a panel of the world's best scientists to evaluate the available research and provide ongoing assessments.

The findings would be reviewed publicly, taking input not only from other scientists, but also from governments and nongovernmental agencies.

The final product, he said, would offer "one-stop shopping" for the public and policymakers, making it "the focal point for all of these complex issues."

The panel's pronouncements would undoubtedly produce political opposition from some sectors, he says.

"But 99 percent of the scientific community would agree [with the panel's advice] if the assessment was authoritative, transparent, and intensively reviewed," Mooney said.

Losing Life

In May the World Conservation Union (IUCN) announced that more than 40 percent of species that have been assessed worldwide are threatened with extinction.

Polar bears and hippopotamuses were added to IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species for the first time, bringing the list's total to 40,177 species (photos: "Selected Species From 2006 'Red List'").

Declining diversity in the world's ecosystems can have enormous impacts for humans.

The loss of mangrove swamps in Asia, for example, means less of a buffer during tsunamis, leading to greater loss of life.

Agriculture is also affected. People spend a lot of money on pest control, Mooney says, but a lot of that expense is to do things natural predators once did for free.

For example, farmers spend money on imported bees to pollinate crops that might have been pollinated naturally if the habitats of native pollinators were preserved.

"We're losing these things, and somehow the general public doesn't seem to get it," Mooney said. "Part of not getting it is the lack of clear, authoritative international messages."

French President Jacques Chirac has lent his support to the proposed panel and is already funding a project to produce recommendations for panel members by early 2008.

Free Email News Updates
Sign up for our Inside National Geographic newsletter. Every two weeks we'll send you our top stories and pictures (see sample).