Introduction

Over the two decades since the term biological diversity came into existence (Lovejoy 1980a, 1980b; Norse and McManus 1980; Wilson, 1980) (later biodiversity – Wilson 1988), the tree of life has been transformed dramatically. Originally two stout trunks representing plants and animals with microorganisms near their base, today the tree of life is a low spreading bush of which two tiny twigs represent plants and animals (see Fig. 2.1) The remainder of the current ‘tree’ is mostly microorganisms, many with strange metabolisms probably dating to the early history of life on earth.

Current knowledge of biological diversity consists of roughly 1.5 million described species. The estimates of the total number of species – described and undescribed – vary considerably. The current consensus (Heywood, 1995) is about 10 million species, although estimates have run as high as 30 million to 100 million As major unexplored parts of the biosphere are investigated – tropical forest canopy, soil biodiversity and marine ecosystems for example – the estimate may well change. For example, an investigation of fungal endophytes (fungi which live in healthy plant tissues) of just two understorey tree species in Panama suggests an astonishingly rich flora of a group which is essentially unknown (Arnold et al. 2000). An All Species Inventory – ‘ALL’ – is being initiated to speed the exploration of the unknown and greater part of biological diversity (Kelly 2000).

Biodiversity and the fraying web of life

This planet is unique, at least as far as we will probably ever know. It contains life, which is maintained through self-regulating flows of energy and chemical connections, the science of which is well described by Tim Lenton (1998). We also know that these webs of life are frayed (World Resources Institute 2000). We are by no means clear as to how much these life-maintaining flows and fluxes are damaged. An assessment by the World Resource Institute (2000: 9) entitled Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (PAGE) indicates that there is still a fundamental ignorance of how this web joins, and of what it consists at any scale of analysis, or of human action. The Board on Sustainable Development of the US National Research Council (1999: 208, 220–1) points out that this ignorance is all th more worrying because of the complex multiple causes and consequences of this disruption. One of the major threats to ecosystem goods and services is our lack of understanding about how specific ecosystem functions may change with ecosystem transformations. Another cause for concern is our hesitation about deciding on options for coping with and ameliorating these fundamental changes. A third limitation is lack of knowledge about, or incorrect valuation of, the ‘worth’ of ecosystem functioning for social well-being and economic advantage.

It has always been a liberal ideal that ‘the people’ control their destiny. From Aristotle onwards, the notion of kratos (rule) by the demos (people) set the basis for a struggle over power and enlightenment. Needless to say, putting such concepts into practice is hugely problematic, since there is no agreement over how rules should be created or obeyed, let alone who constitutes ‘the people’. What we learn from the troubled history of democracy is that any movement to inclusionary and deliberative practices is deeply embedded in institutions of power, social relationships and cultural expectations. It is possible there can be no deliberative democracy, only many quasi-deliberative democracies, each imperfect and only partially tested for equity and effectiveness. And, as we noted in chapter 1, there may only be a biodiversity that is the result of some form of participatory perspective, whether by agreement or by rule, or by a messy combination of science, politics and imperfect institutional design. There is apparently not a ‘biodiversity’ that is other than socially constructed, and managed by the exercise of power, authority and empathetic care.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the drift towards a more inclusionary and deliberative politics in the modern age, to assess how far attempts to incorporate such approaches have worked in biodiversity management, and to take a cool, hard look at its prospects in an emerging world where enduring biodiversity may well have to be participatory.

On biodiversity and humanity

This volume has covered aspects of the state of biodiversity, the threats and the possible solutions, many of which give hope and offer much promise. In poverty-stricken and war-torn lands the fabric of people, species and habitats is being repaired, often at the micro-scale. Where there is a real bond between biota, people and economic opportunity, there can be enriched biodiversity. The following list from Jeff McNeeley (1995: 5) shows that there are many good reasons for protecting beyond the protected:

1. maintaining the essential ecological processes that depend on natural ecosystems, and which provide real economic services;

2. preserving the diversity of species and the genetic variation between them;

3. ensuring the productive capacities of ecosystems as a central element of future economies;

4. preserving historical and cultural features of importance to the traditional lifestyles and well-being of local peoples so that they remain at peace and strengthen their collective esteem;

5. safeguarding habitats that are critical for the sustainable use of species for a variety of moral, utilitarian and spiritual purposes;

6. securing landscapes and wildlife that enrich human experience through their beauty;

7. providing opportunities for community development, scientific research, education, training, recreation, tourism and mitigation of the forces of natural hazards;

8. serving as sources of national pride and human inspiration;

9. providing the basis for genetic safeguard and evolution, for pharmaceuticals and for forest evolution.

All of these opportunities and values are well known nowadays. They appear in many text books, consultants reports and national strategies.

Introduction

The United States possesses great diversity of ecosystems and species. The greatest threat to biodiversity loss in the US comes from the loss and/or degradation of existing habitat. The US has experienced limited success in habitat and species restoration, and more needs to be done to protect remaining special places and the plants and animals that inhabit them.

Federal efforts to protect ecosystems in the US have taken the form of establishing protected areas and enacting legislation, notably the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA), to safeguard species and their habitats. However, some question whether legislation and protected areas do enough to address the systemic causes connected to biodiversity loss. For example, Bean (1999) observes that the ESA has been built on insecure ecological foundations, that it does not provide reliable protection for ecosystems, that it has become politicised, so is more an arena for legal posturing than biodiversity management, and that it has not encouraged community involvement along the lines suggested by Jules Pretty in chapter 4. Against the backdrop of this debate about the adequacy of existing efforts to protect biodiversity, there has been a proliferation of community-based efforts since the mid-1980s to address environmental and natural resource problems, including biodiversity issues. Community-based efforts can be seen as a new and evolving response to the inadequacy of existing institutions to solve the pressing problems, including biodiversity loss, which individuals and communities face.

Biodiversity under threat in Costa Rica

The small Latin American country of Costa Rica is generally known as ‘environmentally friendly’, and therefore has become a paradise for thousands of ecotourists. The Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT, Instituto Costarrecense de Turismo) has initiated an expensive advertising and image promoting campaign with the slogan ‘Costa Rica – no artificial ingredients’. The target groups are North American citizens (USA and Canada), between 25 and 54 years of age, who earn $75,000 or more a year, and have a university education (Tico Times, 7 Aug. 1998). In 1999, the number of tourists reached 1 million (Tico Times, 17 Dec. 1999). A quarter of the country is considered to be protected (see Fig. 11.1). The World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) have spent millions of dollars to support official nature conservation measures and the responsible governmental departments. NGOs provide information and environmental education on site.

Nevertheless, the current condition of the biodiversity in Costa Rica is disappointing. Despite regulations, management initiatives and international financial support, Costa Rica, formerly densely forested, has become an agricultural country. Virgin forests have become rare and are found nowadays only in remote or protected areas. Since the arrival of multinational companies, large areas have been transformed into monocultures, resulting in the pollution of both soil and water.

An African introductory scene

Think of Africa, more precisely of a semi-desert landscape between Etosha National Park and the famous Skeleton Coast in Namibia. Think of the silent and golden moments just before sunset. Then suddenly a sharp crack of branches as a herd of elephant feed on the banks of a small and now dry river in front of Palmwag Lodge. They are not concerned about the load of respectful tourists training cameras and binoculars on them. After a while the tourists return to their sundowners and comfortable chairs, awaiting the next wild offering of this evening. Later that night the herd moves out of Palmwag Concession Area and enters the small fields of neigbouring Grootberg Communal Land.

The next morning the Palmwag kitchen is offering a splendid breakfast of fresh fruit, cereals and yogurt, bacon and sausages, eggs and coffee and juices. The villagers of Humor, one of the settlements near the concessions boundary, are inspecting the trail of destruction caused that night. In just a few hours the herd has eaten or crushed more than half of a millet field which was to have made a major contribution to rural families' subsistence economy.

Saving nature in protected areas

The world's first formal protected area was established on 1 March 1872, when US President Ulysses Grant designated 800,000 ha of north-west Wyoming as the Yellowstone National Park. The next to appear was in 1885 when the State of New York set aside 290,000 ha of the Adirondacks as a Forest Preserve. In neither case was the conservation of nature and wilderness the primary reason. At Yellowstone, it was to stop private companies acquiring the geysers and hot springs, and NewYork's concern was to maintain its drinking water supply.

These were followed by the 1890 designation of Yosemite National Park, and the 1891 amendment revising land laws to permit the creation of more forest reserves. Following this, the then President, Benjamin Harrison, proclaimed fifteen reserves over more than 5.3 million ha (Nash 1973). Reversals followed designations, such as the 1897 Forest Management Act that allowed reserves to be cleared for timber extraction. In the African colonies, authorities gazetted the first protected areas in the early twentieth century. The leading conservationists were foresters from the Imperial Institute of Forestry at Oxford, who dissociated themselves from development responsibilities. Their management philosophy emphasised that ‘the public good was best served through the protection of forests and water resources, even if this meant the displacement of local communities’ (McCracken 1987: 190).

The common theme for this text is that a resilient biodiversity is an indicator of healthy planet and a sensitive human family that cares for its neighbours and its offspring. For this human family to be at peace with itself, it must also be at peace with biodiversity. Species mix is less important for future biodiversity than the connections between species, habitats and social, economic and political outlooks that care, anticipate an adapt. The diversity of species will be maintained only by a diversity of management styles and cultural outlooks that both protect the protected, and recreate biodiversity for a changing society and economy. To monitor, assess and evaluate the great variety of biodiversity management ‘styles’ will enable local action to become global trusteeship. In this spirit of enquiry and hope, the editors and authors will address four objectives.

1. To assess the current and future threat to biodiversity in terms of recorded losses, current dangers, and possible prognoses based on foreseeable developments in landuse change, alterations in climate futures, alien invasions of plants, animals and pathogens, pollution and toxification, all connected to global and regional agreements, and likely shifts in property rights and management regimes.

2. To develop the scope for combining ecological and social resilience by coupling the established management approaches of placing ‘ecology’ and ‘people’ first in the design and operation of safeguarding protected areas and recreating new biodiversity corridors and patches linked to such protected areas.

Introduction

As the processes of global environmental change proceed, the importance of monitoring health outcomes of climate change increases (e.g. Haines. et al, 1993; Haines, 1999). Accurate, reliable and comparable data are necessary for detecting and quantifying the early impacts of these changes on health, and as an essential first step towards planned adaptation to minimize adverse health impacts in a future, environmentally changed, world (McMichael et al., 1996; Balbus, 1998).

These issues are well illustrated by recent developments in relation to global climate change. This chapter developed from a report of a working group convened by the World Health Organization, European Centre for Environment and Health (WHO-ECEH), which prepared a background document for the Third Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health, held in London in June 1999. The document pointed to the need for the monitoring of potential impacts of climate change on human health, and highlighted the potential role of long-term integrated monitoring sites in investigating links between anthropogenic climate change, natural ecosystems and human health.

This chapter also draws on work of the NoLIMITS (Networking of Long term Integrated Monitoring Sites), preparatory action of the European Union ENRICH (European Network for Research in Global Change) programme. NoLIMITS aims to link current environmental monitoring sites throughout Europe, to make available policy-relevant scientific information to address environmental changes and their consequences at local to global scales, to provide a focus for collaborative interdisciplinary research between sites, networks and users, and to explore the possibility of introducing new measurements at existing monitoring sites to meet specific scientific and policy needs.

Introduction

The world is stranger than we can imagine and surprises are inevitable in science; thus we found, for example, that pesticides increase pests, antibiotics can create pathogens, agricultural development creates hunger and flood control leads to flooding (Levins, 1995a, b). But some of these surprises could have been avoided if the problems had been posed so as to accommodate solutions in the context of The Whole, taking complexities into account. Predicting the impact of a changing world on human health is a hard task and requires an interdisciplinary approach drawn from the fields of evolution, biogeography, ecology and social sciences, and relies on various methodologies such as mathematical modelling and historical analysis (Awerbuch, 1994; Levins, 1995a, b; Awerbuch et al., 1996; McMichael, 1997). Indeed, integrated assessment modelling of human health has been recommended as a global methodology to develop prevention strategies, educate policy makers and assess the impact of interventions (Martens, 1998; see also Chapter 8).

When even a simple change occurs in the physical environment, its effects percolate through a complex network of physical, biological and social interactions that feed back and feed forwards. Along some pathways the effects are attenuated and may even disappear; along others they are amplified and can show up at points far removed from their original entry into the system; along still other pathways the effects may be reversed so that, for example, heating may lower the temperature or adding nitrogen to a lake may reduce the nitrogen level (Levins & Lane, 1977).

Introduction

Although mathematical modelling is often used by epidemiologists – to gain insights into the observed dynamics of infectious disease epidemics, for example, or to estimate future time trends in diseases – the complex task of estimating future trends and outcomes in relation to global atmospheric change and human health requires the use of integrated, systems-based mathematical models (McMichael & Martens, 1995). Looking at the complexity of the interactions between global (environmental) changes and human health, we need an integrated approach to ensure that key interactions, feedbacks and effects are not inadvertently omitted from the analysis. The various pieces of this complex puzzle can no longer be examined in isolation. Integrated Assessment (IA) aims to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, thereby indicating priorities for policy.

There is increasing recognition and credibility for the rapidly evolving field of IA. Within the setting of the political arena, it is accepted that IA can be supportive in the long-term policy-planning process, while in the scientific community more and more scientists realize the complementary value of IA research.

At present modelling is the dominant method of performing IA, including looking at global-change impacts on human health. However, many studies that are either explicitly or implicitly integrated assessments are still qualitative in nature, without using any models. Furthermore, the complexity of the issues addressed and the value-laden character of assessment activities make it impossible to address this process using only one approach.