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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49948

BIODIVERSITY: 'Pious Words Won't Save Endangered Species'

By Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Jan 12, 2010 (IPS) - Less than a month after the world's heads of governments failed to sign an international treaty to address climate change at Copenhagen, they are back at making pious speeches, this time in favour of protecting biodiversity, endangered by global warming and other causes.

Meeting in Berlin on Monday, leaders of international organisations, such as the United Nations and environmental groups, and high ranking officials of governments warned again that the present global environmental crisis is decimating biodiversity.

They came to Berlin to officially launch the "International Year of Biodiversity" and celebrate "life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives," as the official line goes.

At the ceremony, the leaders repeated the well-known mantra that the variety of species biodiversity represents constitutes an essential condition for human life, which needs to be preserved.

But biodiversity faces severe man-made dangers. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world's largest coalition of environmental organisations, well over 17,000 species - out of the 47,677 the group has registered in its list as endangered - face immediate extinction.

IUCN affirms that the number of the endangered species rises by the day. At the ceremony in Berlin, the German head of government Angela Merkel called for "a reversal of (this) trend.’’ Merkel emphasised: ‘’Immediately and not some time later."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who attended the ceremony in Berlin, also warned that "species and ecosystems are disappearing at an unsustainable rate. Our lives depend on biodiversity, which we take for granted," he said.

Merkel admitted, however, that the objective of halting the extinction of species by 2010, set at different international conferences on the issue during the past decade, is now illusory.

This is precisely why environmental activists urge governments to end their pious speeches and finally take significant action. Referring to Merkel's speech at the U.N. event, and the lack of policies by her government to protect species in Germany, Magnus Wessel, of the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, said: "Enough has been said, it is time to act."

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