Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
sity; the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the
benefi ts arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources'. Extensive international
negotiations and support, along with key issues of protracted disagreement, marked
the continued evolution of the CBD as a framework-style agreement. (One main
source of disagreement has been the position of the United States that has led efforts
to block or alter the provisions on intellectual property rights proposed and sup-
ported by tropical biodiversity-rich countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.) Two
global organisations, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN,
based in Switzerland) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), were
central to the processes and preparation that had led to formalisation of the CBD
at the 'Earth Summit.'
Economic and political issues are one persistent source of uncertainty stemming
from deeper disagreement about how to fi nance the 'global approach to the con-
servation of biological diversity' that is called for in the CBD (McNeely, 1988). To
date, the UNEP, the World Bank, and the latter's Global Environmental Facility
(GEF), along with international development organisations, have provided notice-
able fi nancing for biodiversity assessments and conservation, although not without
controversy (see Sections IV and V below). This funding has often targeted national
and regional or local counterparts throughout the world (in such projects as the
Global Biodiversity Assessment and the Global Biodiversity Strategy). The country-
level agencies and 'on-the-ground' organisations have served as crucial institutions
- albeit sometimes overlooked - in the consolidation of biodiversity-related interests
as a global phenomenon (Bassett and Zuéli, 2003; Zimmerer, 2006a,b).
Biodiversity: Biogeography, Ecology, Geosciences, and Genetics
Global, country-level, and regional biogeographic scales analysis serve as principal
frames of reference for biodiversity science. The global scale consistently provides
a vital outermost framing. It is evidenced, for example, in the Planetary Biodiversity
Initiative of the US National Science Foundation. The global scale of biodiversity
science is also featured in many environmental and conservation organisations, such
as Conservation International (CI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and The Nature
Conservancy (TNC) in the United States, and the World Conservation Monitoring
Centre (WCMC) in Great Britain. General references to sub-global biogeographic
units have been similarly central - 'the tropics' has been highlighted throughout the
recent wave of interest. As the same time, the biogeographic scales of region-, land-
scape- and local-level have also become core concepts within biodiversity thinking
(MacDonald, 1995; Reid, 1997). Similarly foundational are country-level framings,
such as the so-called 'megadiversity countries' (e.g., applied frequently to Indonesia,
Madagascar, and Brazil).
Biogeography is the root of the productive growth of biodiversity science, espe-
cially through the theoretical and applied usefulness of the Theory of Island Bioge-
ography (pioneered by biologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson), with
subsequent revisions and continued widespread use (Lomolino, 2000; Whittaker,
2000). Environmental complexity, in addition to spatial area
per se
, has become a
principal theme in evaluating and estimating biodiversity-supporting habitats.
Changes such as forest fragmentation typically require the analysis of both human
drivers and biophysical factors. Patterning of these changes can be modelled using
algorithms to evaluate and select the design of reserves or protected areas (PAs) for
