CBD – UN Convention on Biological Diversity
* Small island states are looking at ways to evacuate their entire populations, says UN chief
Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or for the entire Earth. Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems. The biodiversity found on Earth today consists of many millions of distinct biological species, which is the product of nearly 3.5 billion years of evolution. 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. READ MORE: > HERE <
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), known informally as the Biodiversity Convention, is an international legally binding treaty. The Convention has three main goals: 1. conservation of biological diversity (or biodiversity);2. sustainable use of its components; and 3. fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. In other words, its objective is to develop national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. It is often seen as the key document regarding sustainable development. Read More: >HERE<
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They include eradicating extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and developing a global partnership for development. Read More: > HERE <
Bio Diversity, preventing Deadline Life http://www.cbd.int/ – After suffering decades of obscurity, biodiversity, and the importance of saving it, is finally rising to the top of the international agenda. But will political declarations translate into the resources and action that are so urgently needed?
The United Nations General Assembly dedicated a high level summit to biodiversity which gave much-needed political impetus for a sustained global response to the crisis facing the natural world.
IUCN Director General Julia Marton-Lefèvre explains why the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Nagoya on 18 October, is so important for the future of our planet. / Millenium Development Goals for 2015 -In the year 2000, 189 leaders from around the world met at the historic Millenium Summit in New York.According to the then Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan, the UNs role for the next millenium will be crucial; making it a focal point for joint efforts in a world that presents worrisome statistics that endanger the perpetuation of generations to come.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is an international organization dedicated to natural resource conservation. The stated goal of the organization is to help the world find pragmatic solutions to the most pressing environment and development challenges. Read More: > HERE <
IUCN, which helped develop the Convention and plays a key role in its implementation, will be present at the conference, trying to ensure that the latest biodiversity science underpins the decisions taken there and that governments commit to an ambitious, yet realistic plan to halt the loss of biodiversity.
Environmental migrants are people forced to migrate away from their homeland due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment. When the migration is considered to be forced and not a matter of choice, the term environmental refugee is also used. Additionally, if the causes for the migration are believed to be due to global warming related environmental disasters, the term climate refugee is sometimes used. Read More: > HERE <
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR; www.unhcr.org), also known as The UN Refugee Agency is a United Nations agency mandated to protect and support refugees at the request of a government or the UN itself and assists in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. The UNHCR has won two Nobel Peace Prizes in 1954 and 1981. Read More: >HERE<
World Migration Report 2010 http://www.iom.int/jahia/jsp/index.jsp
http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2010/12/06/whither-go-climate-refugees/climate-refugees-unep-map/
Royal Society Paints Grim Picture of 4°C Temperature Rise – With no doubt intentional perfect timing as the COP16 climate talks open in Mexico, the Royal Society has released a special issue on the future impacts of climate change and, as you might imagine if you’ve been following the climate research to date, the outlook is entirely grim for many of the planetary systems upon which humans are utterly dependent. As The Guardian puts it, the Royal Society describes a „hellish vision of a world warmed 4C within a lifetime.“
Many of the articles in the special issue are open access , and TreeHugger has covered many of the topics before, but here’s the gist of what failure to reduce emissions sufficiently to keep global average temperature rise means:
First of all, as one of the papers puts it, there’s „little to no chance“ of keeping the ongoing rise in global surface temperatures below 2°C doing things the way we have been and even the old target of 2°C is no longer considered enough to prevent „extremely dangerous climate change.“
By perhaps as soon as 2060, and likely by 2070 at the latest, temperature rise will pass 4°C above pre-industrial levels. By that time,
Drought and desertification would be widespread…there would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on [wild] ecosystems. Large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Though temperature increases will affect the whole world, with regional increases of up to 8°C possible over southern Europe and North Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa things could well be particularly bad (the emphasis in this quote is from Climate Progress, which has a typically thorough overview of the research),
The prognosis for agriculture and food security in SSA in a 4C+ world is bleak. Already today, the number of people at risk from hunger has never been higher: it increased from 300 million in 1990 to 700 million in 2007, and it is estimated that it may exceed 1 billion in 2010 . The cost of achieving the food security Millennium Development Goal in a +2C world is around $40-60 billion per year, and without this investment, serious damage from climate change will not be avoided. Currently, the prospects for such levels of sustained investment are not that bright. Croppers and livestock keepers in SSA have in the past shown themselves to be highly adaptable to short- and long-term variations in climate, but the kind of changes that would occur in a 4C+ world would be way beyond anything experienced in recent times. There are many options that could be effective in helping farmers adapt even to medium levels of warming, given substantial investments in technologies, institution building and infrastructural development, for example, but it is not difficult to envisage a situation where the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people in SSA could simply be overwhelmed by events.
Though the picture of the world we are directly helping to create through lack of action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is undeniably dark, let’s remember that there is still much that can be done to, if not fully avoid some of the worst of climate change, reduce the impact through adaptation both technologically, socially, and culturally.
Here’s the full collection of content from the Royal Society: Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/royal-society-grim-picture-4c-temperature-rise.php
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