Earth Equity News

World Leaders Tackle a Tall Order: How to Preserve Life on Earth. By Patrick White, Toronto Globe and Mail, 10/18/10. “193 national delegations have descended on Nagoya, Japan, in pursuit of a vexing goal befitting a deity: how to preserve life on Earth. At stake is the fate of the U.N. Conference on Biological Diversity, an international agreement signed amid great hope and fanfare in the early 1990s, the status of which has fizzled steadily ever since. The document bound countries to cut mass species loss ‘significantly’ and preserve 10% of the world’s ecological regions by 2010. But this year brought the sobering realization that not one country had met those targets. After 20 years of high-level talks and treaties, mass extinction continues apace at between 1,500 and 15,000 species a year, depending on the estimate, and leaders are running out of opportunities to turn it around.”