I did some posts earlier this week about the biodiversity summit in France – which was focused on creating an IPCC-like reporting organization about plant and animal life. Well, a few hours ago, this sobering take on the conference was issued by the publisher of The Daily Telegraph in the UK: “A three-year French-led effort to set up a powerful international scientific body advising on the threats to the variety of life on Earth has ended in embarrassing stalemate.” Fingers are being pointed. But it’s just one story and we’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, those who care greatly about the creatures of the earth can be thankful — yes, on the eve of Thanksgiving here in the States — for individuals who don’t wait for large international bodies to reach consensus. I’m thinking about somebody like Jeff Corwin who held up the Panama Golden Frog yesterday on Ellen and asked people to go to Amphibian Ark’s Web site. I think about Sir David Attenborough, Jean-Michel Cousteau, zoo chieftains around the world, researchers in India, Atlanta, Carbondale. People who write blogs about wildlife and conservation.
Keep going, people.
November 22, 2007 at 5:33 am
I followed the link from your comment on hell’s handmaiden.
Great blog.
November 22, 2007 at 7:28 am
Thanks, Heather.
November 23, 2007 at 10:19 pm
That is quite unfortunate. I’m sorry the movement collapsed.
November 23, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Let’s just hope there’s a more optimistic aspect to this that the reporter chose to ignore. There are lots of future meetings planned by the IMoSEB folks, and I guess if the meetings actually happen, then there remains a lot of commitment to the initiative.
November 26, 2007 at 9:03 pm
yeah let’s wait and see
if you just have a look to the final statement of the meeting , you can think both ways.
due to this process, the situation is clearer , Biodiv issues reached a higher level event if sa lot of work has to be done now
December 19, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I am the author of the Telegraph piece on IMoSEB and came across this thread. I thought it may be helpful to explain the somewhat downbeat tone of the intro — it was obvious throughout the proceedings in Montpellier (sometimes rather ill-tempered) that a significant minority felt the case had not yet been clearly made for a new international body as the best way of improving the “science-policy interface” on biodiversity. Hence the somewhat bizarre attempt to produce consensus wording on the remit of a body for whose existence there was no consensus. I have not had any comments from participants at the meeting challenging my overall assessment — my personal view is that there is still reasonable momentum for setting something up (certainly NOT to be called IMOSEB!) but that it will be extremely difficult to get agreement on its remit once it enters the rocky waters of formal inter-governmental processes — especially as key governments such as Brazil (Latin America was absent from the Montpellier meeting) have already made clear that want nothing to do with it at this stage. I hope this helps, happy to elaborate for anyone on a 1 to 1 basis.