Category: Policy

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Another bad joke

“Conserving Biodiversity – The UK Approach” has just been launched, and very worthy it is too. There are many sensible suggestions, including about what individuals can do. And there’s much talk of “joined up working across the public, voluntary and business sectors,” and of “a more holistic or ecosystems approach” which recognizes “the interconnections between living things, their environment, and the services they provide.” In fact, the press release kinda reminded me of a recent article about buzzwords whose whole first paragraph consisted of one buzzword after another.

The one buzzword that’s missing, of course, is agrobiodiversity. But you knew that.

Despite all the hand-waving about joined-up holistic interconnected strategic partnerships, in 24 pages there is one — oblique — reference to traditional farming, and one sentence on the desirability of something called “agri-environment schemes.” There’s also a weird table on the implementation of the strategy in the four countries that make up the UK, which is supposed to outline the biodiversity duty of public bodies as determined by legislation (p. 10). The word “agriculture” appears in the sections on England and Northern Ireland, but it really is very difficult to understand what that actually means. And that’s it.

Maybe somebody who knows more about this document — and the process which gave rise to it — can help us out here. Was the exclusion of agricultural biodiversity from the national strategic framework for biodiversity conservation in the UK a matter of conscious choice? Or did it just fall through the cracks, as usual?

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Scots forget agricultural biodiversity

Scotland has published figures on trends in a set of biodiversity indicators developed by the Scottish Biodiversity Forum. The indicator of “vascular plant diversity” does include consideration of agricultural landscapes: “although not statistically significant, the survey pointed to possible declines among already low numbers of wild plants present” on arable and horticultural land. Otters are doing better, however, which is good. But what about native livestock breeds, crop wild relatives, landraces? There doesn’t seem to be anything about agrobiodiversity in these indicators. Of course. Pity.

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Rising food prices threaten on-farm biodiversity

Back in the 1990s the European Union, concerned about over-production of poor-quality cereals, introduced set-aside. Farmers were required to not grow food on a percentage of their land, currently 8%, and were paid to do so. The result was an increase in biodiversity; wildflowers, insects, birds, that sort of thing. Now, with rising food prices, there’s a proposal to reduce the area of set-aside to 0%, and conservationists are unhappy.

This is an old argument. Grow more food more intensively and you spare some “wild” habitat. I suppose the question is, how long will high food prices last? Until rain returns to Australia? Or until the world wakes up from its ethanol binge?

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ABS deconstructed

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has an on-line decision-making tool to help you work your way through Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) arrangements ((Thanks to Danny for the find.)):

Under the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Fair and Equitable Sharing of the Benefits Arising out of their Utilization, of the Convention on Biological Diversity, companies commit to sharing benefits of the use of genetic resources with host countries. Through its SECO funded Access and Benefit Sharing project, IISD has led the development of the “Access and Benefit Sharing Management Tool”– a voluntary tool for implementing the Bonn Guidelines.

It seems quite thorough. For example, it includes discussion of how the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) fits into the larger ABS picture.

Kathryn over at Blogging Biodiversity suggests that treating biodiversity like a string of sausages — one set of rules for agrobiodiversity, another for medicinal plants, a third for microbes perhaps, etc. — may not be such a good idea. She recognizes that there are very good reasons why agricultural biodiversity should be treated in a different way to medicinal plants, for example, but is worried about this being the beginning of a nasty slippery slope. But the ITPGRFA is international law, whatever its faults, and the wider biodiversity ABS community is slowly learning to live with it.

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Conserving crop wild relatives

A paper just out in Biological Conservation discusses crop wild relatives (CWR) in the UK. ((Creation and use of a national inventory of crop wild relatives. Biological Conservation. In Press, Corrected Proof. Available online 27 September 2007. Nigel Maxted, Maria Scholten, Rosalind Codd and Brian Ford-Lloyd.)) The authors include some of the same British boffins who wrote a global survey of CWR conservation. The paper describes how to develop a comprehensive national plan for the conservation of CWR, using the UK as an example. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but I’ll summarize the main points.

First, of course, you need to know what you’re dealing with. A UK national inventory of CWR was developed as part of the EU-funded PGR Forum project. It contains 15 families, 413 genera, 1955 species (44 endemic) — that’s 65% of the native flora. So then you have to prioritize. For example, 13 of the UK’s CWR species are considered threatened according to IUCN criteria and one is apparently extinct in the wild ( the grass Bromus interruptus). The authors ran an iterative algorithm on the distribution data for about 250 CWR species ((Chosen because of their potential economic value and perceived threat level.)) to identify the smallest number of areas which would contain the largest number of species. Seventeen 10×10 km grid squares were selected within which could be found two thirds of the priority CWR species.

To what extent are these “hotspots” already protected? Interestingly, none of them “did not overlap with existing UK protected areas.” What’s now needed is to confirm the presence of the target species in the protected areas and come up with management plans specifically aimed at the CWR.