Nature and Human Society: The Quest for a Sustainable World (1997)
Chapter: The Response of the International Scientific Community to the Challenge of Biodiversity
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The Response of the International Scientific Community to the Challenge of Biodiversity
Biologists became increasingly alarmed at the loss of biodiversity during the 1970s and 1980s. The issue was treated mainly at the national level at that time and was primarily the concern of conservationists rather than scientists. The prospect of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, encompassing such issues and raising them to treaty status, found the international scientific community ill prepared.
Nevertheless, before the summit, the international scientific community had taken some action to identify the scientific issues requiring action. For example, the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) held a workshop on the ecosystem function of biological diversity in Washington, DC, in 1989 (DiCastri and Youngè 1990), which identified possible subjects for study and was adopted as the framework of an international program of biodiversity science, named DIVERSITAS in 1992. The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Resources Institute (WRI) had been most progressive in holding a series of regional consultations and workshops in developing a global biodiversity strategy (WRI and others 1992) containing a daunting 85 recommended actions. Finally, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) organized ASCEND 21 in Vienna in 1991 to develop an agenda for science and development in the next century (Doodge and others 1992). ASCEND 21 not only reviewed problems of environment and development, scientific understanding of the Earth system, and responses and strategies, and made eight recommendations for action where focused on
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additional research required, but also recognized the need for the scientific community to strengthen links with development agencies and other organizations charged with addressing environmental problems.
Science was full of expectations at the time. Issues of concern to scientists were on the agenda of ministers at a level that scarcely could have been dreamed of even in the middle 1980s. The anticipation was that key scientific questions and other issues related to the magnitude and description of biodiversity and its significance at the ecosystem level were to be addressed. Scientific questions transcend and do not recognize national boundaries; indeed, that is one of the beauties of science. They also can require concerted international efforts and resources for their elucidation. In this paper, I examine the extent to which the aspirations of the scientific community have been met, with particular reference to major international biodiversity initiatives.
The Convention on Biological Biodiversity
The Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP 1992), now ratified by 175 governments, is concerned with the sustainable use of biodiversity and the equitable sharing of benefits arising from it. For what is essentially a political treaty, the Convention contains a surprising number of articles related to scientific issues or requiring a scientific base for their implementation. These include articles related to inventorying and monitoring, in situ and ex situ conservation, research and training, public awareness, assessment and minimization of adverse effects, technology transfer, and technical and scientific cooperation.
The implementation and work plans of the Convention are discussed by government delegations and observers at conferences of the parties (COPs), which have met almost annually since the convention came into effect in 1994. Also, a Subsidiary Body for Scientific, Technical, and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), which has met annually since 1995, considers matters referred to it after each COP. Topics discussed to date have included agrobiodiversity, a clearinghouse mechanism for information exchange, marine and coastal biodiversity, freshwater ecosystems, forest biodiversity, indicators, monitoring and assessment, and taxonomic capacity-building.
The current financial mechanism for implementing the Convention is the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Most of the funds it supplies support the incremental cost of projects within less-developed signatory countries, although some regional projects and a few enabling activities unrelated to a country have been supported. The effectiveness of the GEF is a continuing cause of concern to the parties to the Convention.
Progress in implementation has been slow, an overriding view that emerged from Earth Summit + 5, which was convened by the United Nations in New York City in June 1997. Many of the issues highlighted as continuing concerns depend on the biological sciences for progress: the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in freshwater, oceans and forests, and progress toward sustainable agriculture.
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A major development linking the Convention to the scientific community was the signing of a memorandum of understanding with DIVERSITAS (see below) in November 1997. As a result, a meeting of experts was convened in Mexico City in March 1998 to prepare recommendations on scientific research that should be undertaken for the effective implementation of the Convention. The report was welcomed by the fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention in Bratislava in May 1998 and referred to the next meeting of SBSTTA, to be held in Montreal in June 1999, for further consideration. The Bratislava meeting was also important in agreeing on the need to develop a Global Taxonomy Initiative.
Global Biodiversity Assessment.
The first major global scientific project in support of the Convention was the Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA) (Heywood 1995). This work aimed to provide an extensively peer-reviewed assessment of our current state of knowledge on all aspects of biodiversity. The project was initiated by UNEP. The steering group first met in Trondheim in May 1993, funding details were finally agreed on early in 1994, and the 1,140-page volume was published in November 1995. The GBA was an extensively reviewed assessment of the known, so it was not appropriate for it to make recommendations, which is not always appreciated. However, it did tackle thorny questions such as the numbers of known and estimated species, extinction rates, and the ecosystems at greatest risk.
The statistics related to the GBA are impressive: The exercise involved 16 steering-group members, 26 section coordinators, five major workshops and review meetings, five editorial-group meetings, three section workshops, 385 contributors, and 536 peer reviewersoverall, 1,003 scientists (not allowing for those acting in more than one capacity). The project was made possible through a US $3.1 million award from the GEF. Although at first this might appear excessive, the true cost has been estimated to be about 6 times that figure in a GEF-commissioned independent review of the project.
The successful realization of such a major work by the world's scientists in so short a time demonstrates unequivocally that if the resources are available, scientists are prepared to change their itineraries and commit to deliver the required product.
Diversitas
The DIVERSITAS program is the major international response to the scientific challenges of the Convention. Conceived at the Workshop on Ecosystem Function and Biological Diversity held by IUBS and SCOPE in Washington in 1989 and named DIVERSITAS in 1992, it had as parents SCOPE, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and IUBS. The conceptual frameworks and agendas for various aspects of biodiversity research being developed under the program attracted increasing interest, and the sponsoring organizations now include ICSU, International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS), International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP), Global Change
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and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), and IUCN. ICSU is now the lead body on the scientific organizational front, and substantial financial support has been received for the secretariat from UNESCO. The steering committee is currently chaired by José Sarukhán. Through the links of the biological unions to the various international specialist scientific organizations (for example, the 83 scientific members of IUBS), DIVERSITAS has the potential to obtain input from an enormous treasure-house of expertise and to bring together biologists who rarely see or communicate with those in related disciplines, and who even might speak in different languages or “biobabble” (Lovelock 1995). One important achievement of both DIVERSITAS and the Gaia-hypothesis debates has been to bring together scientists from disparate fields and to focus them on common problems. The resulting synergism is not only stimulating and intellectually challenging, but also facilitates the holistic approaches demanded by considerations of both the conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity and global ecology.
DIVERSITAS is divided into five core programs and five special target areas for research, or STARs (figure 1). These are all interlinked and related to a
Figure 1
The Core programs (numbered 1–5) and special target areas (STARs, numbered
6–10) of DIVERSITAS.
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consideration of the human dimension. The core programs focus on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning; the origins and maintenance of and change in biodiversity; systematics, inventorying, and classification; monitoring of biodiversity; and conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of biodiversity. The STARs, selected because they were judged to be particularly neglected topics of crucial importance to our overall understanding of biodiversity, are devoted to soil and sediment biodiversity, marine biodiversity, microbial biodiversity, and freshwater biodiversity.
For example, in the case of soil, although we know something about the functional interconnections of the groups of organisms present, we are almost totally ignorant of the numbers of species of bacteria, fungi, and nematodes, in particular, that are involved in specific ecological processes. Even the techniques that exist for examining soil biodiversity are not standardized, and a first step in this STAR was to prepare an authoritative synopsis of the methods now in use (Hall 1995).
Although DIVERSITAS is still in the process of developing action plans and seeking funding for the core programs and STARs, substantial progress has been made in several. In 1991, the IUBS-IUMS Committee on Microbial Biodiversity, the implementing body for the microbial biodiversity STAR, recommended the development of a Biodiversity Information Network. Later named BIN21 and expanded to all aspects of biodiversity, this now operates from the Fundação de Pesquisas e Tecnologia André Tosello in Campinas, Brazil, and is used extensively (Canhos and others 1994).
The importance of wild relatives of domesticated organisms was recognized from the outset as an issue that needed to be addressed. The importance of this subject has been confirmed by the development by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of a global plan of action for plant genetic resources (FAO 1996). As a component of its conservation core program, DIVERSITAS is contributing to plans for implementing that action plan.
SPECIES 2000, an element of the systematics, inventorying, and classification core program, originally launched by IUBS and cosponsored by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and IUMS, has been supported by both UNEP and the Convention. This project aims to index the world's species by the establishment of a federation of interlinked global master species databases and a comprehensive name-finder tool (Bisby and Smith 1996; figure 2). The formation of a federation between key organizations that have data pertinent to the mission of SPECIES 2000 has been impressive. A pilot system is already operational on the World Wide Web, and now funding is needed to build authoritative databases for the groups of organisms that lack them.
Establishing a firm basis for communication necessitates both a system like that being developed for SPECIES 2000 and a more stable protocol than currently used for the scientific naming of organisms. This is clearly a responsibility of international science, and to this end, IUBS and IUMS are collaborating in the production of proposals for a unified BioCode to regulate the names of all organisms from a date to be agreed on (Greuter and others 1998; Hawksworth
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Figure 2
The Structure envisaged for SPECIES 2000.
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1995). The IUBS General Assembly in Taipei in November 1997 has recommended this for consideration; the bodies concerned with the different codes were urged to also incorporate elements of it into existing codes.
A prerequisite to address our ignorance of perhaps 80% of the species with which we share the planet is a sufficiency of scientists who are able to recognize the known and describe the newly discovered. A shortage of biosystematic skills is inhibiting the ability of nations to implement the Convention, as recognized in the decision of COP3 in Buenos Aires in 1996 to support a global taxonomy initiative. The shortage of biosystematists has been a concern of biologists for more than 50 years. Data in the GBA show that only 6,989 biosystematists published new scientific names in 1992 (Heywood 1995). The Systematics Agenda 2000/International component of the systematics core program of DIVERSITAS is developing plans to address these gaps in knowledge and skills, and progress is reported by Joel Cracraft (this volume).
The need to implement a Global Taxonomy Initiative was endorsed again at COP4 in 1998 (see above), which considered the Darwin Declaration drawn up by representatives of various systematic institutions and organizations in Darwin, Australia, in February 1998. DIVERSITAS, in conjunction with Environment Australia and the GEF, then met at the Linnean Society in London in September 1998 to consider how to develop this initiative (Australian Biological Resources Study 1998). Later meetings organized by DIVERSITAS and Systematics Agenda 200/International in New York in September 1998 and by DIVERSITAS in Paris in February 1999 assessed needs and ways of defining priorities and making recommendations for consideration by SBSTTA in June 1999. This is a most welcome development involving scientists as partners in developing guidelines for actions to be taken by governments and supported by international agencies, such as the GEF.
Also pertinent to the shortage of biosystematics capability is a complementary intergovernment initiative, BioNET-INTERNATIONAL (BI). Launched in 1993 and facilitated by CAB INTERNATIONAL, BI is a strategy for enabling developing countries to establish and sustain realistic self-reliance in biosystematics (Jones 1997). The seed was sown at the Golden Jubilee of the Systematics Association in 1987 (Haskell and Morgan 1988). BI is organized into a series of seven regional locally organized and operated partnerships (LOOPs; figure 3). The LOOPs are established with the support of the governments involved and develop agendas and work programs appropriate to their needs. The focus is on the species-rich groups that are least understood, notably arthropods, fungi, and nematodes. The LOOPs are supported by networks of institutions in developed countries that commission the work. The Technical Secretariat of BI supports the establishment of LOOPs and assists in obtaining donor funding for the implementation of their programs. BI has been successful in securing funds from a wide array of donors, including the Swiss Development Corporation, the UK Department for International Development, UN Development Programme (UNDP), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technick Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), and the Centre for Technical and Rural Co-operation.
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Figure 3
The Regional LOOPs of BioNET-INTERNATIONAL.
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The Challenge
This paper has been eclectic in focusing primarily on two major international initiatives. My intention was not to denigrate in any way the remarkable work of such bodies as the IUCN, the World Conservation and Monitoring Centre, WRI, and the UN agencies. My purpose has been threefold: to show something of what can be achieved if the resources are available, to discuss the vision of scientists who are concerned with organizing a major thrust to address issues of biodiversity, and to consider the challenges that must be faced in transforming this vision into reality.
Pleading does not work with funding agencies, especially if we seem to ask for funds to do what we have always done and enjoy doing. Agendas must mesh, as they did with the GBA, and do with BioNET-INTERNATIONAL and the Global Taxonomy Initiative. Neither is it a matter of being just a salesperson. Arriving at donors' doors with our wares to sell and expecting them to open their checkbookseven if we believe that what we have to offer is in danger of being lostdoes not work.
We need new skills and approaches. Major funding is always linked to political agendas, and it is those we must influence at the formative stage. McNeely (1995) has encapsulated the requirements to be met at the political level. We also need to learn how to talk to politicians. Scientists are cautious by nature, tending to present tentative results that always seem to call for further research, but politicians want answers as quickly as possible.
We must avoid what is viewed as a “green maze” between science and politics: when there are conflicting opinions, the reaction of politicians and donors is to leave well enough alone. In August 1997, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America that in the case of climate change, although there was a scientific consensus, there was not a public consensus (Macilwain 1997). A key virtue of the assessment approach, as seen in the GBA, is to present a scientific consensus view of what we know. This approach is being translated into a consensus of what biodiversity science should be doing in the DIVERSITAS model, but if these thrusts are to realize the required level of support, they need to take the wider public along too.
A credibility gap also has to be filled. Scientists involved in field studies of organisms have always been a source of amusement to cartoonists, and the scientist stereotypes portrayed in current television and cinema productions do not help. We need to meet this challenge of credibility by presenting ourselves as being capable of helping politicians implement their agendas. This is an issue for individual, as well as collective, action. As individual scientists, we must take time out from the pursuit of knowledge to be public-relations workers from the local to the national and international levels.
At the international level, ICSU has a key role to play in the elevation of science in the political arena. Now the primary nongovernment sponsor of DIVERSITAS, ICSU is composed of the various international scientific unions and national academies of sciences and their equivalents. It has the potential to be perceived as the voice of world science, and it merits recognition and
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representation at the highest political levels whenever scientific issues and priorities are under debate. ICSU is undergoing a review of its structure and role, in which raising profile and credibility must be seen as key matters for the future health of scientific endeavors.
We scientists also must be prepared to act in concert now. It is no good to say that we will get organized tomorrow. The window of opportunity to secure major international funding in some parts of biodiversity science might already be closing. A worthwhile reflection is that it took 7 years to provide DIVERSITAS with a secretariat that could begin serious consensus-building on the scientific tasks required.
In this article, I have endeavored to show by example how the international scientific community is responding to the challenge of biodiversity. We have seen what can be achieved through coordinated and adequately funded efforts in the GBA, and now we have a vision of what subjects need to be addressed through DIVERSITAS. The challenge is to put energy into working at the political and donor levels if we are ever to transform scientific potential into realityresults required by and delivered to others.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Colleen Skule-Adam and Patricia Taylor for comments on an earlier draft.
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