Conservation, Videos & Documentaries, Wildlife & Flora, Oct 4th, 2010,
In terms of conservation, plants do not receive as much attention as cute cuddly animals like pandas or polar bears. Let’s face it – they don’t even rank up there with giant salamanders. But plants provide food for all living things and are essential to life on Earth. The untapped medicinal and technological resources in plant life around the world are unknown but potentially invaluable. Therefore preserving plant species and maintaining botanical biodiversity is an important, if often overlooked, issue. One fifth of the 380,000 plant species on Earth are threatened by extinction, mostly due to human activity. This month,…
Tags: biodiversity, biological, convention, diversity, japan, Nagoya, plants, species
Climate Change, Politics, Wildlife & Flora, Aug 19th, 2010,
In advance of a major UN meeting for the Convention on Biological Diversity, the organization’s secretary-general, Ahmed Djoghlaf, recently warned of the threats posed against the natural world – and life itself – by population growth, urbanization, agriculture and climate change. Despite these increasing threats and an ongoing mass extinction in the natural world, which is almost 1,000 times the normal ‘background’ rate, governments are simply not acting to preserve biodiversity and the overall health of the planet. No country has met its targets to protect nature. We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. If current levels [of destruction]…
Tags: Ahmed, biodiversity, biological, change, climate, convention, diversity, Djoghlaf, Nature, rainforest, threats, UN