Extinct and unmourned

A database of endangered creatures fails to list those most at risk

ONE of the problems facing nature conservationists is that they often have little idea what is being lost. The places where flora and fauna flourish are frequently remote, inaccessible or both. It is one thing to know that the Amazonian rainforest or the seas off the Sahara desert are threatened. It is quite another to know which species in those ecosystems will be lost if they are badly damaged. The recent launch of a database containing details of creatures threatened with extinction is supposed to change that, but the task looks daunting.

When nature conservation first became a popular cause, in the early 1960s, one of its champions was Peter Scott, a British naturalist, artist and Olympic yachtsman, and son of the ill-fated polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. He decided to draft lists of endangered species, known as the Red Data books, for a body called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Letters were sent from the union’s base in Morges, Switzerland, to naturalists, asking them to to assess the status of different species of animal and to grade them into one of five categories: very rare and getting rarer; less rare but threatened; stable; unknown; and formerly rare but now no longer in danger.

In due course particulars about many species arrived in Morges. These concentrated on what conservationists now call “charismatic” species: apes, lemurs, marsupials, parrots, polar bears, turtles and whales. Their global numbers were duly recorded along with their degree of endangerment, the state of their habitats and details of measures being taken to protect each species. It may have been scientific but it was also a very bureaucratic way of identifying where action was needed.

In June the Zoological Society of London launched an online version of Scott’s books. It unpicks the existing global lists held in Morges and examines them at the national level. It should thus be possible to identify which species are at risk of extinction within any given country’s borders. The database contains details of more than 50,000 species in 40 countries and regions, such as the Baltic Sea.

That may sound impressive, but it is not. It demonstrates that whole swathes of the world have been left unexamined. Countries missing from the list include some of the world’s most biodiverse nations, such as Indonesia and Madagascar. Even Brazil, with its Amazonian rainforests, is absent. Just six countries in the Americas are identified as containing endangered species, along with nine in Africa, nine in Europe and 11 in Asia.

The list’s sparsity shows that in the parts of the world where biodiversity is greatest and conservation planning is most important, conservationists lack the information with which to prioritise their efforts. These are the places where extinctions are likely to be occurring most rapidly, and species are probably disappearing without their existences ever having been documented.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty that was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was supposed to encourage the 191 countries that signed it to develop national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of their biological diversity. A decade later a target was set to halt the decline in biodiversity by the end of 2010. Your correspondent suspects that it will be impossible to demonstrate whether or not that target has been achieved, if only because no one knows how many species there are on the planet.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13979392