Environment ministers of leading wealthy and emerging nations Friday adopted a "charter" on protecting biodiversity as they concluded climate change talks in Italy.
The 25-point Syracuse Charter explicitly links safeguarding biodiversity to the fight against global warming, saying: "Biodiversity and ecosystem services are critical for regulating our climate."
The charter also urges raised awareness that "ecosystems provide a steady flow of goods and services" — by providing clean drinking water, pollinating crops and decomposing waste, for example — "and the costs of their loss."
Climate change is a growing threat to biodiversity at a time when a quarter of all animal and plant species may be at risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Species are becoming extinct at a dizzying rate — between 100 and 1,000 times the natural pace of extinction — scientists say.
The cost of bailing out financial institutions during the economic meltdown, while huge, pales in comparison to the lost value caused every year by ecological damage to the environment, they say.
The Syracuse Charter underscores "the key role that biodiversity and ecosystem services play in underpinning human well-being and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals," urging action to protect biodiversity in the forestry, fishery and agriculture sectors.
It also urges "investents in biodiversity as a driving force to overcome the economic crisis, to promote job creation and to generate long-term benefits."
The charter seeks to spell out ways to reinforce and extend goals for 2010 that were set in 2002, calling for "an achievable post-2010 common framework on biodiversity."
The three-day meeting in Sicily brought together countries responsible for more than 40 percent of the world's carbon gas emissions.
The United States and China each use up about a fifth of total global biocapacity, but US per capita consumption is much higher.
G8 environment ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States were joined at the talks by their counterparts from China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea and Egypt.
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