We need to place a higher priority on conserving biodiversity now in order to ensure the survival of humans in the future. We need to emphasize the management of public lands not for revenue or resource extraction but instead for ecosystem services and habitats for potentially useful animals, plants and microbes that we do not fully yet understand. We need to add the global conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services as a top-tier priority in foreign policy. The biosphere must be equally or more important than economic systems.
Make conserving biodiversity and ecosystems higher priority
Tags: biodiversity stimulus
Comments (6)
Recommendations from the 9th National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment:
Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World
http://www.ncseonline.org/Conference/Biodiversity/Recommendations/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20Breakout%20Recommendations%20v4%20edited%20draft%2001.28.pdf
(1) Biological diversity of an ecosystem is controlled by more than just climate, so saving important areas
and ecosystems is a worthwhile goal even if the individual species that make up those areas and ecosystems
is expected to change due to a changing climate.
(2) Conservation should consist of networks of resilient systems that are linked, so species can move.
Learning to shepherd change will be the challenge.
(3) The management process should include collecting baseline data, prediction, action, monitoring, and
analysis. In this way, we can learn as we manage. Without baseline data and predictions, we will not be able
to increase our knowledge about the efficacy and impact of management action.
(4) Current indicators of ecosystem health may not be suitable as the climate changes. Indicators and
standardized monitoring will need to be developed with climate change in mind.
(5) Interagency communication and cooperation in monitoring across large scales is needed. Standardized
monitoring and data analysis across all natural resource agencies, as well as a central depository for
monitoring data, will lead to a better understanding of broad scale trends, species status, ecological function,
and regional anomalies.
(6) Some of the topics that need more research and better understanding include: (a) tipping points and
thresholds of change (b) how systems recover from disturbance (c) baseline data on range and variation for
many ecological variables, over broad spatial scales (d) developing better and more sophisticated measures
of change in ecosystems (e) how to conserve floodplains.
(7) Some of the barriers to sound conservation of ecological resources include (a) lack of national leadership
on the topic...
Metrics/scales like the "Coefficient of conservatism" should be used more often in speeches on this issue by national leaders, like President Obama, to show that biologists and land managers are not being purely subjective and romantic in making decisions to protect and manage wild lands for biodiversity.
http://www.fhsu.edu/biology/ranpers/ert/fqa_cc.htm
Our ability to maintain clean air & water and adequately adjust to climate change is dependent upon healthy ecosystems. Climate change itself is a symptom of the overall decline in ecosystem health -- simply too much human impact. Soren is right that this will, and is beginning to, double-back on us. The dramatic loss of biodiversity (i.e. life) and its resulting loss of diversity which we are currently experiencing undermines the fundamental resilience of the planet and hence our ability to thrive (and survive). We need to identify ways to leave nature alone more if we are to maintain our standard of living. The recent decision to protect roadless areas in National Forests is a good example. The rest of our public lands, mainly managed by the Bureau of Land Management provide great opportunities in that regard. Reducing pollution and energy consumption are also important to ecosystem health.
Thank you for including the rest of your idea in the comments section, so as not to hog space like others' ideas do. Great idea, too.
Within the context of the theme of openness, transparency, participation, collaboration that are at the heart of this dialogue, it might be helpful to include recommendations re systematic collection & publication of data on ecosystem services, habitats and species on public lands, including simple, structured procedures for citizen input - e.g. from bird-watcher groups and environmental organizations.
While the necessary data should include a focus on the impact of Government actions relating to public lands, it would also be vital to collect data on undisturbed areas of public lands, so that there can be full awareness of the growing impacts of global climate change on the national heritage that public lands represent.
Given the climate change context and its impact, along with pollution, on ecosystems and biodiversity, it would also seem to make sense to integrate meteorological & air & water quality data with the ecosystem and biodiversity data.
From a broader perspective, the Government should also develop strengthened procedures for collecting and publishing data on the carbon footprint of government activities - although perhaps it would make sense to submit a new idea on Monitoring and publishing the carbon and biodiversity footprints of all Federal Government activities and decisions - including the recent decision to permit additional mountain removal for coal mining - and the development of strategies to reduce or eliminate those footprints.