Environmental issues are deeply connected to the well-being of Families worldwide.

WFO Environment is a new section of our website where we select a series of news and important information regarding the sustainability of our planet.

Updated monthly, this is another way for WFO to promote important information for its members and most important for Families all over the world and we do hope you enjoy it.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development

2012 is the year of the The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, that will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on June 20-22.

The World Family Organization will have an important participation during the Rio +20 Conference, working alongside Office for ECOSOC Support and Coordination UN NGO Branch, and UN NGO Inter-Regional Network.

Click here to keep informed on the news and activities involving WFO and the Rio +20.

The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC) inaugurated its 50th anniversary celebrations on 8 June, World Ocean Day, at a ceremony and exhibition held at UNESCO in Paris.

The celebrations offered a chance to showcase the IOC’s achievements over the past 50 years and consider its future role.

‘The IOC is a standard-bearer for UNESCO’, said Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. ‘Indeed, it is integral to my vision of our Organization’s role in the 21st century: providing essential continuity while responding
to the changing needs of today’s and tomorrow’s world.

[The IOC’s] contribution to climate science is a good example,’ she observed in the company of Assistant Director- General and Executive Secretary of the IOC Wendy
Watson-Wright, French Secretary of State for Sustainable Development Valérie Létard and French navigator and IOC spokeswoman Maud Fontenoy. ‘The challenge posed by climate change is a main focus of my mandate and I recognize the vital role the IOC must and will play in that regard,’ Bokova said. She highlighted the role of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), the ocean component of the Global Climate Observing System which supports the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The role of GOOS is continually evolving but keeping the system mantained is critical to ensuring that data are available on demand, such as when a disaster strikes.

Since the explosion and sinking of an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April, flow-rate modellers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have estimated that 20 000–40 000 barrels of oil – and possibly 50 000 barrels – have been leaking into the Gulf every day. US scientists used models developed with GOOS data to produce a study released on 3 June which indicates that, within weeks, oil from the massive spill might extend thousands of kilometres along the Atlantic coast and into the open ocean. The spill has demonstrated how useful regular ocean observations are to disaster response – and
how inadequate ocean observing systems are, even in a rich country like the USA. Vital equipment for oil spill response, such as coastal radar which could provide realtime data on surface currents and thus the oil spill movements, has either not been deployed or been inadequately maintained in the Gulf of Mexico.

During the anniversary ceremony, Geoff Holland, former chair and architect of the IOC’s Ocean Charter in 1998, presented an Ocean Call appealing for greater priority to be given to programmes in coastal and ocean management, ocean sciences and ocean technologies.

Representatives of a youth delegation also presented a call for action from policy-makers and a list of their own commitments. ‘Deeply troubled by the rapid degradation of the oceans and seas, and in support of the recognition of the ocean as a public good for all humanity, we ask for the establishment of a global ethics board, which we propose to name the United Oceans,’ they said. Since 1998, close to 800 young people have taken part in national, regional and international youth delegations and parliaments organized
with the help of the World Ocean Network. The next youth delegations in 2011 and 2012 will take place in the Caribbean and South Africa.

From 40 nations when it first came into being into 1960, the UNESCO-IOC has grown to 138 Member States today, including a number of landlocked countries.

For details: www.unesco.org/en/ioc-50anniversary

The resurgence of public interest in plant-based medicine, coupled with the rapid expansion of pharmaceutical industries, has fuelled demand for medicinal plants, causing many of them to be overexploited.

Such has been the fate of the guggul plant Commiphora wightii), a thorny bush found in the States of Rajasthan and Gujarat in India but also in arid and semi-arid zones of Pakistan.

The guggul plant produces a sap, or resin, that has been central to Ayurvedic medicine in India for nearly 3000 years. It is mentioned in classic Ayurvedic literature as being an efficacious treatment for bone fractures, arthritis, inflammation, obesity, cardiovascular disease and lipid disorders like high cholesterol levels. It is still widely used today to treat these ailments.

Thirty-one year old Vineet Soni is Associate Professor within the School of Life Sciences at Jaipur National University. Dismayed to see the guggul plant slipping towards extinction in an apparent climate of indifference, he founded the Save Guggul Movement in November 2007. Less than three years later, the fortunes of the guggul plant are looking up. Vineet Soni is living proof that, with a little determination and some help from your friends, one person can make a difference.

Why is the guggul plant so vulnerable?

The biggest threat comes from overexploitation by pharmaceutical companies but its habitat is also being converted for agriculture and engulfed by urbanization. Adding to
its vulnerability is the fact that it is found only in the wild, grows slowly and has a poor seed germination rate. A guggul plant generally takes about 10 years to reach tapping
maturity in an arid or semi-arid climate.

The guggul plant features on the IUCN’s Red List. It is calalogued there as data-deficient because we know numbers are declining but not to what extent. However, as early
as March 1994, the Government of India banned the export of guggul plants as a result of increasing exploitation.

In 2008, The Red List catalogued 45 tree species from India as being critically endangered and 246 plant species as being threatened but this went largely unnoticed in India.

Unfortunately, more then 90% of the raw plant material used in herbal industries in India is drawn from natural habitats.

What motivated you to found the Save Guggul Movement and how did your project get off the ground?

I had studied various biochemical and phytochemical aspects of the guggul plant towards my PhD in botany, so was familiar with the plant’s remarkable qualities. Upon returning home in November 2007 after completing postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, I was struck by the fact that the plant was becoming scarce, yet nobody seemed to care. That is when I decided to found the Save Guggul Movement, or Guggal Bachao Abhiyan in Hindi.

Conservation cannot work without the involvement of the people who depend on biodiversity. That is why the first thing I did was to organize a series of awareness-building programmes in 23 villages in Rajasthan in 2008, with the help of friends. Local villagers and tribes responded enthu-siastically.

After participating in a series of meetings, talks and discussions, these communities are now more aware of what they stand to lose if the guggul plant disappears from the landscape. They now also know how to protect the plant.

What do they use the plant for?

In addition to herbal remedies, the guggul plant is used for fuel by some rural communities. Women and children especially go into the forest daily to collect guggul wood
for cooking purposes. There is an abundance of alternative plants they could use, so I advise people to collect these instead.

Guggul-gum can also be purchased in a loosely packaged form under the trademark of Dhoop, an incense which is burned over hot coals. The burning coals produce a fragrant
dense smoke. People then carry the burning coals through the home, lingering in every corner for a few seconds, as this is said to drive away mosquitoes. Some believe it also
drives away evil spirits. I advise people to replace Dhoop with electronic mosquito repellents, which are sold locally at a low price.

Who collects the guggul-gum?

The oleogum resin is mainly collected by local unskilled tribal and rural people who make several deep incisions on the stem to extract a maximum amount of guggul-gum. The thick branches are incised during the winter to extract the oleogum resin. Collected crude oleogum resin is then sold at market or directly to pharmaceutical companies.

I explain to people that these crude tapping methods are now thought to kill the plant. After making an incision, the ‘tappers’ apply a paste around it consisting of a mixture of horse or wild ass urine, oleogum resin and copper sulphate.

This method increases the amount of guggulgum yielded by the plant to three to four times that obtained using normal tapping procedures. However, after a couple of years, the shrub becomes unfit for tapping and ultimately dies of copper sulphate poisoning.

Elders told us that, during the 1960s and 1970s, pharmaceutical company representatives
had come to see them and employed villagers to collect oleogum resin from the guggul plant. The companies provided them with a special knife known as a mitchie golledge and with ethephon, an ethylene-releasing synthetic chemical known as 2-chloroethyl phosphoric acid. It has now been proven that the application of ethephon on the cuts enhances guggul-gum production several times over but that, in the long run, this technique exhausts and kills the plant.

I advise villagers not to collect oleogum from natural habitats, as access is restricted by the government, which has passed various acts to save the plant from extinction. To ease
the pressure on wild populations, I myself am working on the creation of a network of protected areas.

Many of the well-documented species groups, such as higher plants or terrestrial vertebrates, tend to be located in the humid tropics and sub-tropics, especially in mountain
areas with high geodiversity. Generally speaking, biodiversity decreases as you move from the equator towards the poles. An area the size of a football stadium in the lowland rainforest of equatorial Ecuador harbours 1000 different species of trees, shrubs, herbs, lianas and epiphytes – as many plant species as you would find in all of Ireland or in the Yukon Territory in Canada! It is no coincidence that the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, in one of the top five global centres of plant diversity,2 Atlantic Brazil.

This said, there are also extra-tropical centres of diversity. The European Alps sport floral diversity comparable to that of the central Congo Basin. In temperate South Africa, the Cape Floral Region is one of only six floral kingdoms in the world.

Even areas with comparable environmental conditions may show great disparities in the number of plant species. Namaqualand in west South Africa is hot and arid yet harbours an estimated 3500 plant species. The central Sahara is almost 100 times larger but hosts far fewer than
1000 native plant species.

Quantity versus quality

Biodiversity is more than simply a matter of the sheer number of species. One key qualitative aspect considered in biogeography is the size of the species’ range. Rare species or species that can only thrive in certain conditions are considered of greater concern for conservation than other species. The floras3 of many islands in particular have high proportions of species with a restricted range. More than 85% of Hawaii’s 1140 native plant species are endemic and thus occur nowhere else. The German federal state of Thuringia is a similar size to Hawaii with a comparable overall species richness but does not have a single endemic species! Around 70 000 plant species, or one-fifth of global flora, are endemic to oceanic islands, which account for just 3.6% of land on Earth. Due to their restricted distribution area, many of these endemic species are highly threatened. If
their habitats are destroyed or replaced by the introduction of non-native invasive species, the endemic species are irreversibly lost. Islands may thus warrant a high priority in global biodiversity conservation this century.

Consulting the archives of biodiversity

When we began mapping plant biodiversity worldwide in the 1990s, we were able to consult a variety of sources of information and data, such as flora treatments, species
checklists or ecological studies. There are still large gaps in places like the Amazon Basin, parts of the Congo Basin or New Guinea where we know very little about the flora and
fauna. However, the scientific collections assembled over the past 250 years in our natural history museums, herbaria, seed banks and botanical gardens can still provide us with a
good overall picture of global plant diversity.

Add to this the recent advances in information technology, geographical information systems (GIS) and digitally available natural history data and our team of biogeographers
had all the tools it needed to study the causes and consequences of shifting biodiversity patterns around the world.

We also interacted with the major environmental NGOs, all of which have their own science programmes for mapping biodiversity and identifying priority areas for conservation, such as Conservation International or the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). For sub-Saharan Africa, we were particularly reliant on the collections in natural history museums. These ‘archives of biodiversity’ are all the more precious in that they contain information on where and when each sample was collected.

Mapping plant diversity in Africa

The research institutions participating in the BIOTA network are sub-divided into four regional research networks: BIOTA West Africa, BIOTA East Africa, BIOTA Southern
Africa and BIOTA Morocco. Over the past decade, the results of monitoring projects at each of the biodiversity observatories in Africa have not only been published in scientific journals but also shared with stakeholders to support decision-making related to conservation and sustainable development. Relevant information is accessible to all
partners in the form of data nodes, Internet databases and checklists of flora and fauna. Field work in the context of BIOTA West Africa, for example, has helped to increase the
number of known plant species in Burkina Faso by 30% in the past 15 years. Scientists and decision-makers can also consult an environmental atlas for the West African region.

The BIOTA Africa project has made it possible to install GIS and infrastructure like the Gusõn medicinal botanic garden in Benin or the Information Centre on Biodiversity at
the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, inaugurated in January this year. The project has also trained African students, conservation officials and para-ecologists. The
latter are ecologists who replace formal academic credentials with on-the-job training. For instance, BIOTA Southern Africa hired and trained para-ecologists in South Africa and
Namibia to help with field studies and work as field rangers on nature conservation projects. The para-ecologists were appointed to facilitate exchanges between researchers and local land-users. BIOTA trained each para-ecologist in biodiversity assessment, vegetation monitoring and the use of technical equipment like global positioning systems.

Protected areas in Africa (top left) and three hypothetical approaches to conservation. Based on detailed distribution data for about 15% of African plant species, it is estimated that current protected areas protect about 83% of the species investigated but only 48% of rare plant species. If every one of the 42 countries in this region were to protect its priority site (circa 10 000 km² each, or 2.1% of sub-Saharan Africa in total) characterized by the highest plant species richness (unilateral approach), 38% of rare species might be protected; if, instead, the same number of 42 priority sites covering about 2.1% of Sub-Saharan Africa were optimized via a hypothetical Pan-African approach, 62% of rare species might be covered. A pan-African approach covering 8% of the continent’s surface area (top right) might even protect 81% of rare plant species.

In this regard, the launch of the GEO Global Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) by Diversitas4 and other partners in 2008 has been a leap in the right direction.

It is time to shoulder our responsibilities

Although prioritizing areas for biodiversity conservation is a complex process, today there is a farreaching consensus among scientists on a global minimum set of irreplaceable key biodiversity areas where conservation would be most effective. However, despite the existence of solid empirical evidence for nearly a decade, environmental degradation continues and is even accelerating at many of these sites.

We know that most of the effects of climate change on biological systems will only be detectable on medium- to long-term time scales. Yet, the funding policy of many science foundations tends to focus on research projects of 3–5 years duration. This is a terrible impediment to long-term monitoring of global environmental change and especially the impact on natural ecosystems.

Biodiversity has no lobby to defend its interests.
Nor do ecosystem services appear on the balance sheets of traditional economic thinking. The mission of science is to raise awareness constantly of the dangers facing biodiversity and sustainable development. But policy-makers also have a duty to translate scientific findings into laws and initiatives and to put adequate prices on the services provided by nature. Even more importantly, policymakers, the media and scientists themeselves have
a duty to educate the public better about the value and vulnerability of biodiversity.

Marine ecosystems provide us with a minimum of US$20.9 trillion in goods and services every year. Yet, we treat the sea like a sewer, a dump and an inexhaustible supply of fi sh. The ecological responses tell it all: a loss of over 90% of top predators, collapsing fi sheries and a shift from vertebrate-rich waters to seas dominated by jellyfi sh, with an increasing number of dead zones. A study published in Science in 2008 estimated that almost every square kilometre of the oceans was under threat (see map overleaf).

Four of the most common approaches to systematic conservation planning are: hotspots,
representation, ecoregions and key areas. Each of these approaches reflects a different
biogeographical concept and data.

Hotspots

The simplest conceptual approach is to prioritize ‘hotspots’, those areas where there is
most of something. With nearly 100 000 km2 of coral reefs – 34% of the world’s total – and over 2000 species of reef fish, Southeast Asia is unquestionably a hotspot of species richness. It is estimated that the relatively small area between the Philippines, Indonesia
and Papua New Guinea (the ‘Coral Triangle’) harbours 83% of the world’s coral species and 58% of reef fishes (see map). However, this species richness is primarily due to a concentration of overlapping distributions of wideranging species like the Bengal sergeant major (Abudefduf bengalensis), rather than an abundance of species with restricted ranges (endemics) like the spikefin goby (Discordipinna griessingeri).

From an ecological perspective, however, it may be that biodiversity ‘coldspots’, or speciespoor regions, are more vulnerable. For one thing, low diversity implies a greater likelihood that the extinction of one or more species will mean the loss of a critical ecosystem function. Coldspots also contain disproportionately large numbers of endemic
species. In 2002, scientists mapped the distributions of 3235 species of fish, corals, lobsters and snails and showed that, as on land, restricted-range species in the sea were concentrated in centres of endemism.

While the hotspot approach is relatively simple, politically appealing and analytically transparent, assuming high-quality data, there is a risk that such an approach may disenfranchise communities in ‘non-hotspot areas’ who also need to be engaged in the conservation effort.

Representation

A second approach to conservation priority-setting is to ensure adequate and comprehensive representation of each habitat type or biogeographical zone. Devising appropriate classifications of the marine environment, however, in order to assess representation at a range of spatial scales is no easy task. Marine classifications are based on a variety of data that include direction, the velocity and persistence of currents; temperature and ice-cover; geomorphology; satellite images; sonar soundings; faunal records; biotic associations and percentage of endemism. ‘Rooted’ ecosystems in the sea, such as coral reefs, seagrass, hydrothermal vent faunas, oyster beds and soft-coral gardens are easier to map than ecosystems in the open sea (pelagic zones), notwithstanding the challenges involved in locating them.

Ecoregions

Recently, there has been a shift towards an ‘ecosystem approach’ in marine conservation, with scientists going beyond patterns and numbers to consider the ecological functioning of areas. In this way, linked ecosystems such as coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds are considered together in an ecoregional management plan.

Key areas

The ‘key areas’ approach does not depend on a prior classification step but simply focuses on specific locations where significant ecological processes take place. For example, key areas include breeding grounds for whales, turtlenesting beaches, upwelling areas, migration corridors, or sites where particular threatened species exist.

Juggling different approaches

In practice, international NGOs use a combination of approaches to help them determine their conservation priorities. Conservation International’s marine programme was initially driven by a hotspots approach, combining hotspots of endemism with hotspots of threat from a map-based analysis similar to the one shown above. Currently Conservation International is focusing on three broader ‘seascapes’ using additional biological and socioeconomic criteria.

In 1995, the IUCN assessed the degree to which existing marine protected areas contributed to a representative system but this initial assessment was hampered by a lack of an agreed-upon global biogeographical framework. Recent reviews using the Marine Ecoregions of the World classification8 show that only 16 of the world’s ecoregions have
more than 1% of their area designated as no-take zones. This classification is now being used in global and regional conservation planning by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF),