Panama City, 23 April 2012 – After several years of international negotiations, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was finally established. IPBES aims to accomplish for conservation science what the highly successful IPCC has accomplished for climate science questions. SCB has participated in the negotiations and will continue to focus on IPBES in the future. Carolyn Lundquist, representative of the Society for Conservation Biology, stressed “the need to for IPBES enhance the transparency of the platform through direct involvement of stakeholders and civil society organizations as observers.” The official press release stated:
IPBES aims to tackle head-on the accelerating worldwide loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem service by bridging the gap between accurate, impartial and up to date science and policy-makers. Although many organizations and initiatives contribute to improving the dialogue between policy-makers and the scientific community in this field, IPBES is established as a new platform, recognized by both the scientific and policy communities to address the existing gaps and strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services. “Today, biodiversity won”, said the chair of the meeting, Sir Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom. “Over 90 governments successfully established the science-policy interface for all countries. Biodiversity and ecosystem services are essential for human wellbeing. This platform will generate the knowledge and build the capacity to protect them for this and future generations,” he said.
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On April 20, the second anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, SCB, along with three other scientific societies (The Wildlife Society, Ornithological Council, and the Society for Ecological Restoration), asked the Department of Justice to seek fines for the loss of protected wildlife that was caused by the spill. The resulting funds could then be used for restoration of affected wildlife populations. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Gulf oil spill killed hundreds of federally-protected sea turtles, marine mammals, and thousands of similarly protected migratory birds, and did vast damage to other fish and marine and coastal resources. However, the Department of Justice has yet to seek fines or other relief for these violations of the Endangered Species Act and other federal wildlife laws.
The scientific societies urged the DOJ to seek fines under a 1988 provision that requires the fines to be directed to cooperative state and Federal efforts to conserve and recover endangered and threatened species. This could provide as much as $57 million for the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund in response to the documented deaths of sea turtles alone. Funds from oil spill fines allocated through the ESA’s Section 6 Cooperative Fund might also be used to help restore some of the listed and candidate plant species that were destroyed or adversely affected by the spill. Such broader restoration work is essential as wildlife and fish depend on healthy marine, littoral, and estuarial plants. The impacts of the spill on species and ecosystems may persist far into the future and might require hundreds of millions of dollars in restoration to correct the damage.
The full letter is here.
Several international scientific societies joined together on April 2 in asking the Department of the Interior (DOI) to reconsider its proposal for expansion of commercial timber harvesting in critical habitat for threatened Northern Spotted Owls in the Pacific Northwest. In a letter to DOI Secretary Ken Salazar, the Society for Conservation Biology, The Wildlife Society, and the American Ornithologists’ Union called for a full environmental impact statement (EIS) and peer-reviewed scientific assessment on the potential impacts of a DOI proposal that would allow substantial commercial timber harvesting in the critical habitat of threatened northern spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest. The societies are recommending that the EIS identify a range of experimental forestry techniques, appropriate scientific methodologies to assess those techniques, and a scientific process for evaluating impacts on northern spotted owls.
“I am disheartened that we are revisiting this hard-fought protection for northern spotted owls. The spotted owl continues to need protection,” Paul Beier, president of the Society for Conservation Biology, said. “Any activity that can have significant long-term consequences for the owl must be fully vetted by the peer review process. An environmental impact statement is the best vehicle for accomplishing this task,” he said.
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