By Chris Howe

Environmental organisations are often accused of being all doom and gloom. If its not an area of rainforest the size of Belgium/Wales/Luxembourg (delete as appropriate) being lost every year, it is rising sea levels (again) or river dolphins going extinct (again). I can understand why eco-fatigue has joined compassion fatigue when the messages are similar to those we were hearing ten and twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, just because the messages are similar doesn’t mean they are any less true or important. Next week, in Nagoya in Japan the world’s governments – well, most of them anyway, those that have ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity which does not include the United States of America – will meet for the tenth time since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

On the face of it, the grand hopes that the wildlife campaigners of the 1980s thought they had succeeded in making a reality when the CBD was born in Rio in 1992 have been left unfulfilled. On the 22 September UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon said publicly what most governments already know: the 2010 targets for biodiversity conservation will be missed. Not just by a small margin, but in many cases by the equivalent of a small country.

It took the governments who are party to the CBD over a decade to decide on 2010 targets for biodiversity conservation, with agreement finally being reached in 2002. The World Conservation Union set up a “Countdown 2010” initiative to try and turn the CBD biodiversity conservation targets into reality. Their website gives a sobering list of 13 “milestones” over the last decade as governments realised that their words and commitments were no nearer to halting a reversing biodiversity loss than they were ten years ago.

WWF was one of the organisations that helped create the CBD in Rio in 1992. We thought then, and we still think today, that it can provide an important and valuable contribution to saving our precious wildlife. But in order for it to do so, governments – and businesses – need to take it much more seriously. The Guardian newspaper in the UK recently launched their Biodiversity 100 campaign with the idea of using mass public pressure to get governments to take action. It is a great idea, and recognizes that government agreement on action at the CBD is not, despite our hopes, the same as actual action on the ground or in the sea.

That’s because, unlike the CBD’s sister Rio treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, there’s no disagreement, shouting at each other and walkouts. When it comes to wildlife, agreeing targets is the easy part – well, relatively easy. No-one is really going to argue against saving the panda, or the whales, or the coral reefs. When the texts are finally drafted, though, they are usually too vague to be meaningful. Some – such as well-known scientist and the person who coined the word biodiversity, E.O. Wilson – claim that the setting of biodiversity conservation targets has had no discernible influence on conservation action whatsoever.

In Nagoya next week, the same governments that have failed to take action to meet the targets they themselves agreed, will be busy discussing a new biodiversity conservation target – this time for 2020. The question is, will it make any difference? Are they not just shifting their failure out another ten years?

One of the weaknesses in biodiversity conservation that’s seen time and again around the world is the connection – or lack of it – between science and policy. As Guillaume Chapron and George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian: “Those who document the decline of wildlife haven't given much thought to government action; while governments are often shockingly ignorant of what scientists are saying.” Remarkably this is true even in clean green New Zealand. We – I mean WWF, other environmental organisations, scientists and to a certain extent policy makers – know why kiwi are still in decline. We know what actions are needed for Hector’s dolphin to recover. We even know where the most important places are for seabed biodiversity, such as corals and sponges. Why, then, have we not taken the actions needed to conserve them?

Biodiversity – or wildlife, to use a much more meaningful word – is life on earth, and we depend on it for everything. Green plants use the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water (with a few nutrients thrown in) into biomass, and everything else pretty much goes from there. Clean water, medicines, flood control, and food are just some of the direct services we receive from wildlife. Many economists have, over the last twenty years, attempted to put a dollar value on the services our natural world provides. This is certainly one way of trying to get governments to invest in biodiversity conservation, but it is also, in a way, misleading because in the absence of a thriving, biologically diverse planet those services cannot simply be bought from somewhere else.

WWF expects the world’s governments – including New Zealand’s – to make strong commitments in Nagoya next week. But unlike the last ten years, we expect them to be kept this time. If they are not, our planet and the quality of our lives will continue to decline.