“Rwanda’s combination of environmental richness, including rare and economically-important species such as the mountain gorilla, allied to newly evolving and pioneering green policies is among the reasons why UNEP welcomed its offer to be the global 2010 host,” according to the United Nations Environment Programme based in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

While Rwanda faces many challenges ranging from overcoming poverty and developing sustainable energy resources to land degradation, this ‘land of a thousand hills’ is developing forward-looking strategies including the development of renewable energies including hydropower, solar power, biogas and methane gas for power generation.

Rwanda is already internationally-renowned for introducing a ban on plastic bags, nationwide environmental clean-up campaigns and the restoration of previously degraded natural rain forests as part of a chimpanzee conservation programme.

Paul Kagame, the President of the Republic of Rwanda, says: “From preserving our country’s unique biological diversity, to developing modern and sustainable businesses – the environment is central to Rwanda’s vision for prosperity. Protecting our environment ensures a better life for all our citizens and leaves a lasting heritage for future generations. We are honoured to host World Environment Day and look forward to presenting a truly global celebration of the diversity of life on our planet.”

UNEP Executive Director and UN Under-Secretary-General Achim Steiner said: “WED has become a dynamic and global grass roots expression of humanity’s desire to realize meaningful and positive environmental change. And Rwanda is an African nation that, despite big challenges, is seizing the multiple opportunities possible from Green Economic policies.”

“The pairing of Rwanda with WED in 2010 is thus a compelling and inspiring alliance – underlining that all economies, rich and poor and North and South have real and tangible opportunities to shape a more sustainable development path: One that develops new business models based on intelligent management of the natural world and high tech clean and renewable businesses,” he added.

WED is a day for everyone on the planet to get involved and go green – from schoolchildren to presidents and from community groups to multinationals. Rwanda’s capital Kigali will therefore be the venue for this global celebration of the environment, with a myriad of activities over several days to inspire Rwandans, East Africans and people around the world to take action for the environment.

The celebrations in Kigali will be just one of thousands of events taking place around the globe on June 5, 2010. UNEP plans to make WED 2010 into a bigger celebration than ever before, building on the unprecedented success of WED 2009 – when people in more than 80 countries registered activities on the WED website, hundreds of people posted Daily Do Something Tips and more than 10,000 people joined the ‘twitter for trees’ campaign, among other achievements.

Under the rallying cry of ‘Many Species, One Planet, One Future’, WED 2010 is mobilizing more people than ever for the environment on June 5, with a huge variety of activities ranging from school tree-planting drives to community clean-ups, car-free days, photo competitions on biodiversity, bird-watching trips, city park clean-up initiatives, exhibits, green petitions, nationwide green campaigns and much more.

The WED 2010 website www.unep.org/wed/2010/english/ is inspiring, informing and involve people through unprecedented interactivity, offering daily tips, information and statistics on biodiversity, a platform where people around the world can register their activities, social networking campaigns and competitions to get people on every continent involved.

“Anyone can organize an event and register it on the WED website – the most important thing is to give a helping hand to the amazing variety of life on our planet,” says UNEP.

BIODIVERSITY OUTLOOK

One principal conclusion of GBO-3 is: Natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods across the planet are at risk of rapid degradation and collapse unless there is swift, radical and creative action to conserve and sustainably use the variety of life on Earth.

Produced by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), GBO-3 confirms that the world has failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

The report is based on scientific assessments, national reports submitted by governments and a study on future scenarios for biodiversity. Subject to an extensive independent scientific review process, the publication of GBO-3 is one of the principal milestones of the UN's International Year of Biodiversity.

The Outlook will be a key input into discussions by world leaders and Heads of State at a special high level segment of the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2010. Its conclusions will also be central to the negotiations by world governments at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in October in Japan.

GBO-3 warns that massive further loss of biodiversity is becoming increasingly likely, and with it, a severe reduction of many essential services to human societies as several "tipping points" are approached, in which ecosystems shift to alternative, less productive states from which it may be difficult or impossible to recover.

Potential tipping points analyzed for GBO-3 include:

- The dieback of large areas of the Amazon forest, due to the interactions of climate change, deforestation and fires, with consequences for the global climate, regional rainfall and widespread species extinctions.

- The shift of many freshwater lakes and other inland water bodies to eutrophic or algae-dominated states, caused by the buildup of nutrients and leading to widespread fish kills and loss of recreational amenities.

- Multiple collapses of coral reef ecosystems, due to a combination of ocean acidification, warmer water leading to bleaching, overfishing and nutrient pollution; and threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of species directly dependent on coral reef resources.

The Outlook argues, however, that such outcomes are avoidable if effective and coordinated action is taken to reduce the multiple pressures being imposed on biodiversity. For example, urgent action is needed to reduce land-based pollution and destructive fishing practices that weaken coral reefs, and make them more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification.

The document notes that the linked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed by policymakers with equal priority and in close co-ordination, if the most severe impacts of each are to be avoided. Conserving biodiversity and the ecosystems it underpins can help to store more carbon, reducing further build-up of greenhouse gases; and people will be better able to adapt to unavoidable climate change if ecosystems are made more resilient with the easing of other pressures.

GBO-3 outlines a possible new strategy for reducing biodiversity loss, learning the lessons from the failure to meet the 2010 target. It includes addressing the underlying causes or indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, such as patterns of consumption, the impacts of increased trade and demographic change. Ending harmful subsidies would also be an important step.

The document concludes that we can no longer see the continued loss of biodiversity as an issue separate from the core concerns of society. Realizing objectives such as tackling poverty and improving the health, wealth and security of present and future generations will be greatly strengthened if we finally give biodiversity the priority it deserves.

The Outlook points out that for a fraction of the money summoned up instantly by the world's governments in 2008-9 to avoid economic meltdown, we can avoid a much more serious and fundamental breakdown in the Earth's life support systems.

UNEP’s Steiner says that there have been key economic reasons why the 2010 biodiversity targets were not met.

- Many economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems from forests and freshwaters to soils, oceans and even the atmosphere.

- Many countries are beginning to factor natural capital into some areas of economic and social life with important returns, but this needs rapid and sustained scaling-up.

- Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050.

The Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, says: "The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."

"The assessment of the state of the world's biodiversity in 2010, as contained in GBO-3 based on the latest indicators, over 110 national reports submitted to the Convention Secretariat, and scenarios for the 21st Century should serve as a wake-up call for humanity. Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet."

"The Convention's new Strategic Plan, to be adopted at the 2010 Nagoya Biodiversity Summit must tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss. The linked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed with equal priority and close cooperation. Joint action is needed to implement the Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and to Combat Desertification – the three conventions born of the 1992 Rio Conference. The Rio+20 Summit offers an opportunity to adopt a workplan to achieve this."

KEY FINDINGS

GBO-3 uses multiple lines of evidence to demonstrate that the target set by world governments in 2002, "to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level", has not been met. Based on a special analysis of biodiversity indicators carried out by a panel of scientists, as well as peer-reviewed scientific literature and reports from national governments to the CBD, key findings include:

- None of the twenty-one subsidiary targets accompanying the overall 2010 biodiversity target can be said definitively to have been achieved globally, although some have been partially or locally achieved. Ten of fifteen headline indicators developed by the CBD show trends unfavorable for biodiversity.

- No government claims to have completely met the 2010 biodiversity target at the national level, and around one-fifth state explicitly that it has not been met.

- Species that have been assessed for extinction risk are on average moving closer to extinction, with amphibians facing the greatest risk and coral species deteriorating most rapidly.

- The abundance of vertebrate species, based on assessed populations, fell by nearly one-third on average between 1970 and 2006, and continues to fall globally, with especially severe declines in the tropics and among freshwater species.

- Natural habitats in most parts of the world continue to decline in extent and integrity, notably freshwater wetlands, sea-ice habitats, salt marshes, coral reefs, seagrass beds and shellfish reefs; although there has been significant progress in slowing the rate of loss of tropical forests and mangroves, in some regions.

- Crop and livestock genetic diversity continues to decline in agricultural systems. For example, more than sixty breeds of livestock are reported to have become extinct since 2000.

- The five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, over-exploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity.

- There has been significant progress in the increase of protected areas both on land and in coastal waters. However, 44% of terrestrial eco-regions (areas with a large proportion of shared species and habitat types), and 82% of marine eco-regions, fall below the target of 10% protection. The majority of sites judged to be of special importance to biodiversity also fall outside protected areas. (IDN-InDepthNews/23.05.2010)