Indonesia's Biodiversity Key to Getting Conservation Aid: LIPI

Putri Prameshwari Jakarta Globe 15 Sep 10;

Jakarta. The government needs to manage its rich biological diversity better if it expects to get international help in the conservation effort, an expert says.

Dedi Darnaedi, the director of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences’ (LIPI) biological research center, said that among the most urgently needed solutions was the training of more qualified taxonomists, so the country would be able to compile a directory of its biodiversity.

“We haven’t been managing our own biodiversity very well,” Dedi said on Wednesday. “How can we scream for world protection while we continue to fail to protect our own species?”

Dedi urged the government to get its act together in time for next month’s UN Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

One of the items on the agenda at the conference will be access and benefit-sharing (ABS), which allows countries that are signatories to the convention to determine access to genetic resources in areas within their jurisdiction and take appropriate measures to share the benefits.

“The question is: how can countries that are rich in biodiversity benefit from the scheme?” Dedi said.

Astatement released by the CBD said governments around the world have failed to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss, mainly because they do not address the underlying causes.

“[These failures include] lack of awareness of the true value of biodiversity and a failure to include the true costs of biodiversity loss in policies and plans,” the statement read.

According to the CBD, Indonesia, one of the 17 “megadiverse” nations in the world, is home to 10 percent of the world’s flowering plant species and 12 percent of all mammal species. Many of Indonesia’s species — and more than half of the archipelago’s plant species — are found nowhere else on Earth.

However, the CBD said that since 1997 the country’s deforestation rate has reached 2.4 million hectares per year. It said Indonesia’s list of threatened species now included 140 species of bird and 63 species of mammal.

Marine biodiversity is also at risk from destructive fishing practices, which left 40 percent of the archipelago’s coral reefs damaged in 2006.

Dedi said certifying more taxonomists could help Indonesia overcome these failures and “take a step forward in participating in a worldwide agreement.”

“It will take a lot of commitment from the government to empower its researchers,” he said. “The efforts we make now still don’t sufficiently cover the wealth of resources that we possess.”

Young scientists, Dedi said, were now key to protecting the country’s biodiversity and they should be able to compile a comprehensive catalogue of species.

Besides the ABS scheme, the Nagoya conference will also discuss a global agreement on a new strategy for conservation and the mobilization of the funds needed to make it happen, said Ahmed Djoghlaf, the executive secretary of the CBD.

“The decisions we take now will affect biodiversity for the coming millennium,” he said.