...In Praise of Variety

This Saturday, May 22, is the International Day for Biological Diversity.  The day is sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program to mark the anniversary of its Convention on Biological Diversity (“biodiversity”), an international agreement first signed at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.  More than 190 countries – including Jamaica – have now signed this commitment to sustainable development and preservation of the widest possible spectrum of life.

What is biodiversity, and why should we care about it?  Biodiversity is the sharing of living space by different forms of life.  Biodiversity is “high” or “rich” when many living things share an ecosystem.  A healthy forest or coral reef has high biodiversity.  So does a city garden full of flowers, fruit trees and vegetables, with lots of birds, insects and lizards.  Our existence and our livelihoods all depend on a complicated web of other living things, most of which we don’t notice until they’re gone.

This year’s theme is “Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation”.  Our development choices can determine the fate of biodiversity and the “ecosystem services” it provides – starting with the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink, and ending with the products we produce and the visitors we attract.  Yet the way we organize, control, and govern our development processes too often ignores this reality.

Jamaica has made a lot of bad choices.  In the name of development we have chopped down our mangroves, filled in our wetlands, ripped up our seagrass beds, logged out our forests, strip-mined our hillsides and built roads and houses on our farmland.  Very little of the economic benefit from these developments was recaptured to address their social and environmental costs.

As result, our fish are almost gone, most of our coral reefs are barely alive, and a lot of our native trees and birds are now rare.  We import far too much of our food, clothing and energy at prices that are increasingly hard to afford.  And when the resources are gone, or the tourists don’t come, there is nothing to replace the jobs that depended on them.

Biodiversity is too valuable to be so carelessly sacrificed.  For example, a healthy coral reef is very rich in biodiversity.  (It has a head start on other systems because the corals themselves are living creatures.)  The latest estimates from the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study, which UNEP hosts, indicates that each year, coral reefs generate up to US$1 million per hectare (about 2.5 acres) in terms of diving and other tourism revenues, and another US$250,000 per hectare from coastal defenses and other areas of natural hazard management, fisheries, genetic materials and bio-prospecting.  These are not invisible benefits but they are certainly undervalued by policy-makers.

More protected areas may be helpful, but these biodiversity reserves can’t succeed if that’s all we do.  For example, the new fish sanctuary in Montego Bay is necessary to restore the area’s fish population and improve the health of its coral reefs.  But fish can’t breed and thrive in a sewer or a garbage dump (and you wouldn’t want to eat them if they did).  Protected areas can only work as part of a truly sustainable policy system, that honestly counts all the costs of development and makes sure they are paid before the profits escape.