The United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Forests, in order to strengthen the conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests for the benefit of current and future generations. In conjunction with the UN campaign, SCB has issued a declaration outlining twelve recommendations based on conservation science that can help further these goals. Read more…
The following column by SCB Policy Director John Fitzgerald is adapted from an article that will appear in the upcoming issue of SCB’s newsletter, available here later this quarter.
From Nagoya to Nuclear Catastrophe and from Organic Shade Grown Fair Trade Coffee to the Tea Party – in One Season
At the end of 2010 we reported in the Policy Insider and the Newsletter on the considerable progress that SCB’s delegation had made in the meeting in Nagoya, Japan, contributing to and improving the strategic plan and other elements of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s next ten years of implementation.
We also reported on initial attempts in the US Congress to curtail the application of the Endangered Species Act and other bedrock environmental laws, initially by removing gray wolves in two or more states from the endangered and threatened lists. (For more details on these and other issues see the Policy Insider at www.conbio.org/resources/policy.)
Read more…
SCB, along with The Wildlife Society and the Ecological Society of America, this week asked Congressional leaders and the President to reject legislative riders added to the Continuing Resolution that would undermine the Endangered Species Act and other important environmental laws and regulations. The three organizations urged in their letter (link) that lawmakers actively oppose, and if passed, that the President veto, any legislation that would undercut the use of the best available science as the basis for implementing our conservation, environmental and public health laws. Many of the proposed provisions in the House Continuing Resolution, H.R. 1, and scores of amendments offered to it, would not reform the regulatory process to improve the use of science, but rather would halt the public comment and judicial review processes, defund state, private and federal cooperative conservation programs based on science, and replace them with directives supported by particular interests.
Although SCB primarily develops its own policy statements, at times the Society collaborates with other organizations on an issue that affects SCB’s members. The Minnesota chapter of SCB recently teamed with a group of both scientific societies and NGOs (Audubon Minnesota, Fish and Wildlife Legislative Alliance, Minnesota Chapter of The Wildlife Society, Minnesota Conservation Federation, Minnesota Division, Izaak Walton League of America, Minnesota Prairie Chicken Society, and The Nature Conservancy) to ask their Congressperson to help preserve the State Wildlife Grants Program, which is threatened with being ‘zeroed out’ in the new budget. This letter provides a good example of how SCB can effectively use its voice as a scientific society to help advance conservation policy issues. Read more…
A forthcoming article in the SCB newsletter discusses the challenges and benefits of coordinating policy work between SCB’s sections and chapters.
One of SCB’s primary goals is to increase application of science to management and policy. Five general areas have been identified as policy priorities by the global organization: biological security, climate change, green investing, scientific integrity, and treaties. The global organization has a tiered structure. The seven Sections generally address issues of regional, national, international, or larger-scale concern. The approximately forty Chapters generally focus on conservation issues of immediate impact in local and regional areas. Ideally, these foci would complement and support each other. In reality, it has been challenging to coordinate the policy work of Sections and Chapters due to their varying scales of interest. How can SCB encourage policy activity at all levels of the organization while at the same time maintaining a coherent and credible policy voice for the organization as a whole?
Read more…
Scientific integrity is one of five priority policy areas for SCB. It is important to all of us as citizens that decisions by federal and state agencies are informed by unbiased science, and that SCB members and other scientists who work within government are free to do science and speak about their results without political pressure. On March 9, 2009, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, and asked Federal officials to craft recommendations for ensuring scientific integrity throughout the executive branch. SCB submitted comments on this process in May of 2009, both on its own (link), and as part of a group of seven scientific societies (link). Over 21 months later, on December 17th, 2010, the White House issuing a Memorandum (link) to the heads of Departments and Agencies that provides guidance on implementing the new policies on scientific integrity. The new memorandum describes the minimum standards expected as departments and agencies craft scientific integrity rules, including a prohibition on political interference in scientific processes and expanded assurances of transparency. It requires that department and agency heads report on their progress toward completing those rules within 120 days. While SCB has not yet had time to fully review the new memorandum, the Society will continue to track this priority issue as the new policy is implemented.
Each quarter, John Fitzgerald, SCB’s Policy Director, prepares a newsletter describing conservation policy news and SCB’s policy activities. It often provides more depth on an issue than we can post on the blog.
December’s issue can be found here.
SCB today submitted comments on California’s proposed regulations for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and market-based compliance mechanisms (“cap and trade”). These are among the first such regulations in the United States, following similar regulations enacted by the European Union. SCB’s letter communicates the importance of achieving the most rapid reduction possible in human-caused greenhouse gases and other forcing agents, such as black carbon or soot, and combined with measures for ecosystem conservation and restoration. Nothing short of this combination will be likely to avoid accelerating losses in biodiversity and ecosystem services due to climate change. The second point we make in the letter is that California’s mitigation efforts should not rely upon carbon offsets when other approaches are available. In the US system, states have a great array of regulatory tools available under the Constitution, and California is the prime example of a state that uses this capacity to lead in the process, even when the Federal government lags, e.g., in controlling air pollution.
The full letter is here.
The Northern Spotted Owl, which inhabit forests of the US Pacific states, was listed in 1990 as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) due to declining population trends related to the loss of older coniferous forest habitat to timber harvest. Although the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994 was effectively a habitat management strategy for the owl, the subspecies has lacked a formal recovery plan. A recovery plan produced by the Fish and Widlife Service in 2008 was judged scientifically inadequate by reviewers from three scientific societies (SCB, AOU, and TWS). The FWS recently released a draft of a revised plan, and asked the same scientific societies to evaluate whether it now passed muster in terms of its use of ‘best available science’. The recently completed reviews from SCB/AOU and TWS found the new draft plan improved in many aspects from the 2008 version. However, the reviewers found the plan was still inadequate in several major aspects. In particular, both reviews noted that the draft plan was released for public review before completion of the habitat modeling that would be used to design the network of habitat reserves. The SCB/AOU review states “by releasing a draft plan for review before major elements of the habitat and viability analyses were completed, the USFWS effectively precluded detailed peer review of the analyses.” Similarly, TWS felt it “was asked to review a recovery plan that is incomplete, which precluded comprehensive review.” Both reviews called for the FWS to offer another opportunity for peer review once the science underlying the plan is completed.
The SCB/AOU peer review can be found here.
The TWS peer review can be found here.
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Environment ministers from many nations are in Cancun, Mexico this week for the 16th conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Chang. This meeting follows the 2009 meeting of the group in Copenhagen. The Society for Conservation Biology today sent a letter to negotiators in Cancun, continueing the dialogue SCB began with the UNFCCC delegates and Secretariat before the Copenhagen meeting. Among other points, SCB’s letter stressed the imporrtance of including the significant contribution of biologically diverse, carbon-dense primary forests in temperate and boreal regions to climate stabilization in discussions on the REDD+ strategy. REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. “REDD+” goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
The SCB letter is here.
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