Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Saving the Wild Without Roping it All Off
April 10, 2008 3:32 PM
Protecting nature's diversity of species seems to set off fights in the wealthiest countries and the poorest.
But it doesn't have to be that way. After a massive survey of the island of Madagascar, scientists say they can protect the world's wildlife with a new, carefully targeted approach.
They talk of "biodiversity hot spots" -- and if you identify them you can make a tremendous difference without much pain.
"Approximately 50% of plant and 71 to 82% of vertebrate species are concentrated in biodiversity hot spots covering only 2.3% of Earth's land surface," write Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues, in Friday's edition of the journal SCIENCE. They cited figures from Russ Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, who's scoured the globe, looking for economically viable ways to protect wildlife.
Kremen et al catalogued more than 2,300 species found only on Madagascar, which is known both for its variety of wildlife -- and for the widespread poverty there. Their paper is only online by subscription, but there's a Berkeley release HERE.
The government of Madagascar has promised to protect ten percent of its land for nature, and environmentalists are not about to turn down the offer. The purpose of the survey was to decide how to pick good places.
The old approach would have been to find the largest endangered animals and cordon off the forest around them, hoping -- often wrongly -- that smaller species would also be protected while they were at it. It often set off a time-worn conflict, environmentalists and scientists wanting to defend the wild, while people nearby complained about the land around them being declared off limits.
The new approach is to figure out where the most promising places are for all sorts of plants and animals -- the hot spots. On Madagascar, they weren't necessarily in forests. Lowland plains, seacoasts, even a good watering hole, can have value as well.
And protecting these places need not be bad for people. Mittermeier and others forcefully argue that nature, undisturbed, can attract tourists, or harbor the ingredients for new medicines -- all sorts of possibilities that may ultimately bring people more income than slashing and burning forests for subsistence farming.
I've done stories before with Mittermeier, who's based in Virginia but spends much of his time in some of the world's most remote places. We camped with him in a forest village in Suriname, on the northern edge of the Amazon basin in South America. He slept easily. I and my crew hardly slept at all.
(Photo: a stump-tailed chameleon from Madagascar, courtesy Julie Larsen Maher for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which joined in the survey.)
April 10, 2008 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (3)
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Areas of large biodiversity also can indicate areas undergoing change in environment with new species slowly replacing older ones. You still have to expect some to go extinct no matter what you do.
Posted by: Quietman | Apr 10, 2008 3:42:43 PM
It is true that we can safe what is left most efficiently by mapping hotspots and planning carefully, but it still amounts to a last-ditch effort. "Hot spots" are generally on the most productive land, which is of course the land that the people need as well. In fact, most of the original hot spots were probably destroyed long ago. Now we are just trying to mitigate further damage as much as possible but the pressure is relentless.
Posted by: jock59801 | Apr 10, 2008 7:25:06 PM
It is true that "hot spots" are the most productive land, but we need to realize that those spots can be the only spots left in the world. So what should we do, try to preserve them and let the scientist take advantage of their research or let people destroy earth as we've been doing for a while?
I prefer to take the chance and try to save what is left. In Amazonas in South America, people learned how to live with a preserve land and it was a good decision for all. Residents found new ways to built, find food and move from one place to another and animals are still safe. If they learned new ways, why shouldn't we?
Posted by: Sandra | Apr 25, 2008 10:16:53 AM
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