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Saturday, 05 July 2008 |
Biodiversity has enabled farming systems to evolve since agriculture was invented there are about 10 000 years in several regions of the world including Mesopotamia, New Guinea, China, Central America and the Andes. There are now around the world, a vast diversity of agricultural systems that will, for example, rice paddies of Asia to the pastoral systems of drylands in Africa through farms hills mountains of America South.
Biodiversity is the source of plants and animals that form the basis of agriculture and the enormous variety within each species of cultivation and animal husbandry. Many other species contribute to the ecological functions essential which agriculture depends, including the services of soil and the water cycle.
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Saturday, 05 July 2008 |
"Biodiversity is a bit like the game of mikado. You remove a peak and then a second, a third… it nothing happens, until suddenly everything collapses, "illustrates Jacques Weber, an economist and anthropologist, director of the Institute of french biodiversity.
The idea of a possible collapse of life on earth been emulated in the scientific community. The highly respected Michel Loreau, one of the most eminent ecologists french - who chairs the international programme Diversitas and the scientific committee of the international conference "Biodiversity, Science and Governance". This eventually cascades of extinctions that will be difficult or impossible to avoid.
15 to 37% of species could be lost by 2050
However, the outlook is very bleak. Thus, there is just one year, the scientific journal Nature published a statistical study-led by English Chris Thomas of the University of Leeds (1), whereby 15 to 37% of species may have disappeared from the surface of the Earth by 2050 under the sole impact of global warming. And it is even without taking into account the three major threats that weigh on biodiversity, namely the destruction of habitats, overexploitation of resources and the introduction of new species predators or parasites, the source of violent extinctions of species .
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Saturday, 05 July 2008 |
The APPAUVRISSEMENT of biodiversity is one of the most worrying aspects of the global environmental crisis. It is estimated that between fifty and three hundred species of plants and animals go out each day (1), while the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) .
But beyond its loss in progress, the ecosystem faces in implementing ever more massive a new techno-economic system based on mutual reinforcement of a global market now and free from any interference, and a technology cluster within which interact computing, robotics, telecommunications and biotechnology . Biotechnology - this "set of techniques aimed at the industrial exploitation of micro-organisms, animal cells, plants and their constituents (6)" - are present in food to health concerns and a set of productive sectors ranging from agriculture to the pharmacy, through chemistry. As computers, they do not constitute a "sector" or a "branch" in the economic sense, but a bundle of techniques "fluid" (7), ie able to invest l 'Entire technical system and to be diversified applications in many fields.
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Saturday, 05 July 2008 |
The UN Conference on Biodiversity, which ended Friday, May 30 in Bonn (Germany), reaffirmed the goal of slowing the pace of extinction of species and ecosystems by 2010. Yet, nobody really considers more realistic this commitment six years ago by the international community. One in four mammal, a bird on eight, one third of amphibians are threatened, according to the World Union for the Conservation of Nature.
For two weeks in Bonn, more than 5 000 experts from 191 countries drew up a grim picture of a situation described by some as "silent crisis". While climate change is the top of the international agenda, the challenge is the preservation of biological diversity remains largely ignored. Yet it is not simply to "save the pandas and tigers" as recalled by the European Commissioner for Environment Stavros Dimas, but not exhausting "natural capital" of which human societies remain dependent for their survival.
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Saturday, 05 July 2008 |
In the extreme south in the far north, Japan extends over 3,000 kilometers long, covering nearly 25 degrees latitude (from the latitude of Quebec to that of Mexico). Submitted by climates ranging from subtropical to subarctic, this archipelago of more than 3,000 islands has a high biodiversity (97,000 species of plants and animals known).
The Japanese government has developed in 2002 a new national strategy for biodiversity revising the 1995 to recognize the importance of biodiversity as one of the most significant elements of the welfare of Japan. The Japan rose from growth to the socio-economic stability and society is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the environment and the need for sustainable use of land and natural resources to meet future generations without negative consequences on biodiversity. The Ministry of Environment has identified three major dangers in biodiversity conservation: the deterioration or extinction of species caused by human activity, invasion by alien species and the abandonment of land left fallow. If the first two problems are common to many industrialized countries, will rehabilitate abandoned land is a specificity any Japanese. The first project is to restore "satoyama" this part of the territory located on the outskirts of villages that formerly provided in rural Japan, firewood, coal, water and diverse cultures, somewhat equivalent to the french bocage. The second project is to rehabilitate the coastal perimeter, including waters and lagoons. Both territories were the first victims of economic growth after 1945, when won massively land on the sea and built infrastructure in rural areas.
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Biodiversity 
