SCB Policy Blog

Non-native insects and pathogens are seriously harming natural and human-managed forests. Invasive pests and forest diseases, in concert with other anthropogenic disturbances such as land clearing and changes in fire regimes, are dramatically altering the composition and structure of many forests in North America, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Australia, China, Africa and elsewhere. Further, they inflict high costs on society, including: the costs of prevention, control and eradication of the harmful organisms; costs of removing diseased trees; direct market losses (e.g., timber and nursery industries); and loss of nonmarket benefits, including wildlife habitat for vast numbers of species, carbon sequestration to mitigate global warming, and recreational and aesthetic benefits for humans. In connection with the recognition of 2011 as the ‘International Year of the Forest’, SCB recently released a report on ‘Recommendations for Protecting Forests From Introduced Forest Pests and Plant Pathogens’ (available here).
This detailed report builds on SCB’s earlier declaration in support of the International Year of the Forest.

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…

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.