The seas are one of the ecosystems threatened by human activities

At least 25% of the world’s mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to the first assessment of their status for a decade.

The Red List of Threatened Species says populations of more than half of mammalian species are falling, with Asian primates particularly at risk.

The biggest threat to mammals is loss of habitat, including deforestation.

But there is good news for the African elephant, whose recovery leads to removal from the high-risk list.

This year’s Red List looks at 5,487 mammals, and concludes that 1,141 are currently on the path towards disappearance.

Within our lifetime, hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN

This may be an under-estimate, the authors caution, as there is not enough data to make an assessment in more than 800 cases. The true figure could be nearer to one- third.

“Within our lifetime, hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live,” said Julia Marton-Lefevre, director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which publishes the Red List.

“We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend, to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives.”

The report’s authors said the current concern with financial matters must not be allowed to obstruct the decline in the Earth’s natural systems.

“The financial crisis is nothing compared with the environmental crisis,” the deputy head of IUCN’s species programme, Jean-Christophe Vie, told BBC News.

“It’s going to affect a few people, whereas the biodiversity crisis is going to affect the entire world. So there is a risk that because of the financial crisis, people are going to say ‘yeah, the environment is not that urgent’; it is really urgent.”

About 40% of mammal species are compromised because human expansion is putting a squeeze on their habitat.

This is especially important across the tropics, the regions with the highest diversity of land-based mammals.

South and Southeast Asia are identified as regions where extinctions are especially likely in coming years, as that is where the size and living standards of the human population are rising fastest.

Demise of the devils and other mammals under threat In pictures

The second biggest threat on land is identified as hunting, for food or medicines.

However, where hunting has been controlled and conservation programmes implemented, as with southern and eastern populations of the African elephant, populations and entire species can recover.

The elephant’s risk status is lowered from Vulnerable to Near Threatened.

Some species are included for very specific reasons, such as the Tasmanian devil which has been decimated by a viral cancer.

In the seas, bycatch – entanglement in fishing nets, which is usually although not always accidental – emerges as the biggest factor behind current declines, affecting a staggering 79% of marine mammals.

The assessment – which is also published in the journal Science – warns that lack of data about marine mammals may be masking a bigger decline.

“Whales, dolphins, porpoises, and sirenians (manatees and dugong) are so difficult to survey that declines that should result in a Vulnerable listing would go undetected at least 70% of the time,” the authors write.

Outside the mammal arena, the Indian tarantula enters the Red List for the first time, a consequence of over-harvesting for the pet trade.

A further 366 amphibians have been added to the list. This is the most threatened animal group of all, with about one-third on the high-risk list.

A new assessment of climate impacts on the natural world suggests that many species not currently on the danger list will enter it as temperatures rise, particularly in East Africa and parts of South America.

RED LIST DEFINITIONS Extinct – Surveys suggest last known individual has died Critically Endangered – Extreme high risk of extinction. Some Critically Endangered species are also tagged Possibly Extinct Endangered – Species at very high risk of extinction Vulnerable – Species at high risk of extinction Near Threatened – May soon move into above categories Least Concern – Species is widespread and abundant Data Deficient – not enough data to assess

The Red List is published approximately once every year. Although designed as the definitive global list of threatened species, in practice the rankings come from assessments covering different types of plants and animals, and some areas of the list will be more up to date than others.

An assessment of sharks, originally slated for inclusion this year, was delayed and will probably be released later in the year.

In an attempt to make species assessments more certain, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is developing what they colloquially term a “Dow Jones index” for biodiversity.

The idea is to take a random sample of all the world’s species, which will be representative of the whole, and revisit it regularly – perhaps once every five years – to gain a better idea of global trends.

“We are now emerging from the dark ages of conservation knowledge, when we relied on data from a highly restricted subset of species,” said Jonathan Baillie, ZSL’s director of conservation programmes.

The first group to be assessed this way is the land-dwelling vertebrates, but the project will eventually encompass insect, fungi, plants, and various types of marine creatures.

Today sees the kick off for Vegetarian Awareness Month on what is known today as World Vegetarian Day (WVD) – which unlike WMD has the capacity to make the world a better place for everyone, humans and animals alike.

Started in 1977 it is a chance to get involved, whether it is just going veggie for the day, holding a party, getting to know the issues, or to make a positive change beyond the month. Thing is to have fun with it, and celebrate a life style in harmony with sustainable living and being green. Whatever you do enjoy,  and get involved. Here are some ideas.

To see events happening in the world check out the International Vegetarian Union.

Leave a comment to say how you will be celebrating and share ideas.

OTHER BLOGS:

Going one step further: Vegetarianism

GM Corn - scary

Prince Charles – take your pick whether he is concerned about marginal farmers that may be forced out with technological advances, promoting organic farming (with himself as a big producer) or that GM crops will be the biggest environmental disaster the world has ever seen – despite not producing any scientific evidence for these conclusions and that trials for nearly ten years are not supporting such alarmist claims.

It is a political contribution to the debate given that the Government supports the development of GM crops, while saying that it wants a public debate. Whether a future constitutional monarch should lead a political debate, let alone one against the elected government, is one that will annoy republicans but hardly bring down the monarchy unless he were to choke on some GM nuts.

Small farmers are struggling but trying to stop technological innovation is not the way to help marginal farmers who are barely making ends meet. Rather EU and Government policies that inequitably favour big landowners (like for example, at random, the Prince of Wales) benefit disproportionately.

What is happening through in the bio-tech world is that while the use of genetically modified crops has increased 70 fold in the last ten years to 114m hectares Britain is loosing out on research due to vandalism and public fears – with trials that do take place happening in secret which is not exactly helping promote a rational scientific debate on the subject.

The potential benefits of GM crops are worth looking into if they can bring better yielding crops, increase productivity, ultimately increase a more secure supply of food and reduce the negative impact of modern agriculture on the environment. That is not to say that research should not be conducted into the impact of GM crops, nor that there should be a debate on the subject. But the way that Prince Charles has addressed the issue does not help the debate be as cool headed as it could be, and with his self interest in organic farming and the political connotation with agricultural policy he would be best being behind the scenes and promoting the science to assess the impact. As was said when there was criticism of the Royal Society when it covered GM Crops:

In reply to criticisms made of the Royal Society, a Fellow and former Vice-President said that the day’s meeting was based on scientific evidence and fact and he felt that the meeting had been well designed. “To say that Royal Society is losing trust of the community it serves is wrong. It would be better if people listened dispassionately to the evidence and the science and used it to address the questions.”

Below from BBC News:

Prince Charles has his own organic farm at his Gloucestershire estate

Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster “of all time”, Prince Charles has warned.

GM crops were damaging Earth’s soil and were an experiment “gone seriously wrong”, he told the Daily Telegraph.

A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.

The government said it welcomed all voices in the “important” debate over the future potential role of GM crops.

However, Dr Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, said he was “disappointed” by the Prince’s comments because “they do not seem to be based on any solid evidence”.

“Our experience from over 10 years of GM cultivation shows that GM technology has been found to deliver real environmental and economic benefits,” he said.

Mr Little added: “At a time when demand for food and fuel is rising and in the face of growing environmental challenges, we need to find ways to feed an ever-increasing global population.”

BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said the Prince’s “robust” comments were “likely to rankle with the government”, which has given the go-ahead to a number of GM crop trials in the UK since 2000.

“Even for a prince who’s a long-established champion of organic farming and critic of GM crops, these are comments which verge on the extreme,” our correspondent said.

Prince Charles told the newspaper that huge multi-national corporations involved in developing GM foods were conducting a “gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong”.

Relying on “gigantic corporations” for food would end in “absolute disaster”, he warned.

“That would be the absolute destruction of everything… and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future.”

What should be being debated was “food security not food production”, he said.

He said GM developers might think they would be successful by having “one form of clever genetic engineering after another”, but he believed “that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time”.

If they think this is the way to go we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land Prince Charles

Prince Charles, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, said relying on big corporations for the mass production of food would not only threaten future food supplies but also force smaller producers out of business.

“If they think this is the way to go, we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,” he said.

The prince also told the Telegraph he hoped to see more family-run co-operative farms, with producers working with nature and not against it.

The Prince’s comments come at a time of rising world food prices and food shortages.

The biotech industry says that GM technology can help combat world hunger and poverty by delivering higher yields from crops and also reduce the use of pesticides.

‘Untenable’

In June, Environment Minister Phil Woolas said the government was ready to argue for a greater role for the technology.

But green groups and aid agencies have doubts about GM technology’s effectiveness in tackling world hunger and have concerns about the long-term environmental impact.

Responding to the prince’s comments, a spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Safety will always be our top priority on this issue.”

Anti-monarchy Campaign group Republic said: “Prince Charles is quickly making his position as heir to the throne untenable with his meddling in politics.”

I ended my blog The Way We Are by calling on us to  recognise that we can use the fact that we have a common ancestor to embrace our common humanity in order for life to survive on this planet. Sam Harris’ article Mother Nature is Not Our Friend follows on  from there that it really is up for us to do the best we can in the face of a non existent god and the indifference of nature.

 Enjoy!

Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

by Sam Harris

 Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature. I imagined that there were real boundaries between the natural and the artificial, between one species and another, and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe that this romantic view of Nature is a stultifying and dangerous mythology.

Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.

The fossil record suggests that individual species survive, on average, between one and ten million years. The concept of a “species” is misleading, however, and it tempts us to think that we, as homo sapiens, have arrived at some well-defined position in the natural order. The term “species” merely designates a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; it cannot be aptly applied to the boundaries between species (to what are often called “intermediate” or “transitional” forms). There was, for instance, no first member of the human species, and there are no canonical members now. Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens — ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

Will this be a good thing? The question presupposes that we have a viable alternative. But what is the alternative to our taking charge of our biological destiny? Might we be better off just leaving things to the wisdom of Nature? I once believed this. But we know that Nature has no concern for individuals or for species. Those that survive do so despite Her indifference. While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven’t adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene.

But our environment and our needs — to say nothing of our desires — have changed radically in the meantime. We are in many respects ill-suited to the task of building a global civilization. This is not a surprise. From the point of view of evolution, much of human culture, along with its cognitive and emotional underpinnings, must be epiphenomenal. Nature cannot “see” most of what we are doing, or hope to do, and has done nothing to prepare us for many of the challenges we now face.

These concerns cannot be waved aside with adages like, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There are innumerable perspectives from which our current state of functioning can be aptly described as “broke.” Speaking personally, it seems to me that everything I do picks out some point on a spectrum of disability: I was always decent at math, for instance, but this is simply to say that I am like a great mathematician who has been gored in the head by a bull; my musical ability resembles that of a Mozart or a Bach, it is true, though after a near fatal incident on skis; if Tiger Woods awoke from surgery to find that he now possessed (or was possessed by) my golf-swing, rest assured that a crushing lawsuit for medical malpractice would be in the offing.

Considering humanity as a whole, there is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design. We are probably not even optimized for the Paleolithic, much less for life in the 21st century. And yet, we are now acquiring the tools that will enable us to attempt our own optimization. Many people think this project is fraught with risk. But is it riskier than doing nothing? There may be current threats to civilization that we cannot even perceive, much less resolve, at our current level of intelligence. Could any rational strategy be more dangerous than following the whims of Nature? This is not to say that our growing capacity to meddle with the human genome couldn’t present some moments of Faustian over-reach. But our fears on this front must be tempered by a sober understanding of how we got here. Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us.

Article re posted from here.

One economist that I find very accessible, and recommend to people to read who have never covered it before, is Jeffrey Sachs who wrote The End of Poverty. He taught Bono and Bob Geldof about development economics. I mention this article because I happened to buy for the first time Scientific American from a superstore in the UK – in part because it had a CD with all the 2006 articles. Found this article in there available from their website here. Thought I would share with you.

 November 2007

Climate Change

and the Law

Even the Bush administration has started to recognize U.S. legal obligations to fight global warming

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Global negotiations on stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions in the period after 2012 will commence in Bali in December. The main emitters—including Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.—have recently affirmed their commitment to reach a “comprehensive agreement” in these negotiations. They have also promised to contribute their  “fair share” to stabilize greenhouse gases to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” 

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles, if not the very biggest, to such an international agreement has been the U.S. itself. The U.S. not only has failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol—the international framework to limit emissions up to the year 2012—but also has failed to put forward any meaningful stabilization strategy in its place. One of the most shocking aspects of the U.S. failure has been the country’s disregard for both international and domestic law. Yet this lawlessness looks set to change.

In recent years the unilateralist foreign policy of the U.S. government has shamelessly ignored or contravened countless aspects of international law, ranging from the Geneva convention to multilateral environmental treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.

This brazenness has infected the very core of policy discussions in our country. Consider an opinion piece by two distinguished professors of law at the University of Chicago, who argued in the Financial Times on August 5 that the U.S. has no obligations to control greenhouse gases and that if other countries don’t like how the U.S. behaves, they might think about paying the U.S. to cut its emissions.

Stunningly, the law professors completely neglected that the U.S. is already bound to take steps to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by President George H. W. Bush and ratified by the Senate in 1992. Their claim that the U.S. has no duty to avoid damaging the climate of others is flatly contradicted by the Convention, which declares in its preamble that “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law…. [States have] the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.”

Ironically, those law professors are running away from international law even faster than the Bush administration. John B. Bellinger III, a legal adviser to the State Department, recently emphasized the administration’s commitment to international law and referred to its allegiance to a post-2012 climate change framework in that context.

The Supreme Court also weighed in recently to affirm that U.S. domestic law compels stronger federal action to mitigate climate change. Massachusetts, among a number of plaintiffs, sued the Environmental Protection Agency for its failure to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide by automobiles. The court firmly struck down all the EPA’s defenses for inaction: it noted that the EPA is obliged to regulate any deleterious pollutant emitted by motor vehicles; that carbon dioxide clearly falls within that category; that Massachusetts had standing to sue because climate change was already claiming part of the state’s coastline; and that the state was vulnerable to considerably greater coastal losses this century if climate change is not mitigated. Moreover, it emphasized that mitigating U.S. auto emissions would have a meaningful effect on the pace of climate change.

The obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions is therefore already the law of the land, and it’s high time we began respecting those laws. We should do so not only because it is important that we honor our legal commitments but because we made those commitments for reasons of our own survival and well-being. Even an administration that has dragged its feet for seven years is finally beginning to face that reality.