Oct 12, 2009, 14:07 GMT
Johannesburg - The world will miss its target to significantly reduce biodiversity loss by 2010 as plant and animal species continue to disappear, experts said ahead of a conference on biodiversity taking place in South Africa on Tuesday.
As 600 experts gather for the four-day conference organized by the international Diversitas programme, Professor Georgina Mace, vice-chair of Diversitas said: 'Biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate.'
'Yet changes to ecosystems and losses of biodiversity have continued to accelerate,' in recent years, Mace, a professor at Imperial College, London, said in a statement issued by Diversitas on the eve of the conference in Cape Town.
In 2002, members of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to 'a signification reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels' by 2010. Some 191 countries are party to the convention.
But species extinction rates, which conference experts say have already increased more than a hundred-fold since humans began walking the earth, are still rising, experts say.
The Cape Town conference will have a strong focus on the disappearance of freshwater species.
Freshwater ecosystems cover only 0.8 per cent of the earth's surface but contain around 10 per cent of all animals, including over 35 per cent of all vertebrates (animals with a backbone).
Freshwater species are dying off 4 to 6 times faster than species on land and sea, experts attending the conference said.
'There is clear and growing scientific evidence that we are on the verge of a major freshwater biodiversity crisis,' said Professor Klement Tockner of Germany's Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology.
Pollution from farms and factories, increasing demand for freshwater supplies and climate change are all factors contributing to the loss of biodiversity in lakes and rivers.
The situation is particularly acute in areas around the Mediterranean Sea, Central America and China and South-East Asia, the experts say.
Because freshwater biodiversity affects water purification, disease regulation and subsistence agriculture and fishing, they estimate the number of people affected in the billions.
The 2nd Open Science conference, which starts Tuesday and ends Friday, will also discuss the impact of biodiversity loss on nature's absorption of carbon dioxide and the rising global trade in wildlife, with the attendant risk of the spread of disease.
Scientists from the United States, Canada, Japan, Kenya and other countries will also discuss efforts to create a science-based global biodiversity observing system.
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