Countless numbers of species become extinct every year
The Times
12 May 1992
Michael McCarthy
Up to 8 per cent of all species are becoming extinct every year, according to the largest encyclopaedia of the world's creatures, to be published by the Cambridge-based World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
The encyclopaedia, Global Biodiversity, will be launched in London this month to coincide with the expected conclusion in Nairobi of negotiations for a world treaty on the preservation of all living things. The negotiations have been boosted by the global warming treaty agreed in New York at the weekend.
The total number of species in the world is estimated at anything from 10 to 80 million, according to Robin Pellew, director of the centre. About 1.4 million animals, birds, fish, plants, insects and other living things have been named in the encyclopaedia.
Most of the remainder are the millions of beetles and other insects living in the canopy of the tropical rainforest which have not been classified and which Dr Pellew expects to suffer most of the predicted extinctions. Global Biodiversity lists the 464 mammals, birds, insects, fish, reptiles and other fauna known to have become extinct since 1600. They include the great auk, the flightless seabird which bred in the Scottish islands and was last recorded in Iceland in 1844, the Falkland Islands wolf (1976), the quagga, a South African relative of the zebra (1883) and the Caribbean monk seal (1962).
The list excludes the dodo, which disappeared before 1600. Dr Pellew said that many of the birds which have been lost belonged to particular islands and were wiped out when non-native intruders, such as rats or cats, were introduced. Dr Pellew criticised the current form of the biodiversity treaty, which some conservationists feel is less concerned with protecting life than with the fears of developing countries that genetic engineering companies will exploit them by seeking rainforest plants as sources of anti-cancer drugs or new crop strains.
Although all signatories will commit themselves to drawing up conservation strategies and establishing protected areas for wildlife, developing countries are more interested in the treaty's provisions for protecting their financial rights. A pharmaceutical company will no longer be able to send an expedition into the Brazilian rainforest and find a plant that produces a billion-dollar wonder drug without sharing its profits with the Brazilians.
Fear of exploitation has prompted developing countries to suggest that the treaty should name threatened areas and individual species such as the panda. But John Taylor, head of policy research for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, believes this would be perceived as "eco-imperialism".
Simon Lyster, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said that the idea of global lists was not popular because it made it easy to measure how much countries honoured their commitments. "If you just put the panda, the tiger, the elephant and the jaguar on a list, you could measure progress in a large part of Asia, Africa and South America," he said.
Although the global lists proposal is likely to fail, Dr Lyster said that the biodiversity convention would still represent a big step forward. "If we get it, it will be the first simple, legally binding commitment of all countries to conserve all their living things."
The negotiations, which last from today until the middle of next week, will be considerably eased by the developing countries' acceptance of the World Bank's global environment section as the funding mechanism for the climate treaty. It is virtually certain to play the same role for the biodiversity convention.
