(Photo credit: www.marinebio.org)
At the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Bonn nearly 200 countries agreed on measures to protect the world’s most threatened wildlife. They pledged:
1. To set up a deep-sea nature reserve and increase by tens of millions of hectares the area of land protected (the resulting protected area would be twice the size of Germany).
2. To ban experiments to boost plankton growth to reverse climate change, because of the potential risks to other animals.
3. To set global standards for developing biofuels, a renewable energy that has been blamed for deforestation.
But environmentalists said the progress achieved at the conference was still failing the UN Millennium Development Goal, which aims to “substantially reduce” biodiversity loss by 2010.
Elaine Warburton www.geneticsandhealth.com
