Rhett Butler in Mongabay: Schemes to mitigate climate change by protecting tropical forests must take into account biodiversity conservation, said two leading scientific organizations at the conclusion of a four day meeting in Marburg, Germany.The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and the Society for Tropical Ecology (GTOE) jointly issued a "Marburg Declaration" highlighting the dangers of excluding biodiversity from emissions mitigation strategies like the proposed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism, which could direct billions of dollars annually to forest conservation initiatives. The risk is that REDD developers may focus efforts where land is the cheapest and most carbon-dense, leaving other biologically-rich ecosystems exposed to degradation or destruction. In some cases REDD could even bias conservation decisions against low-carbon ecosystems that are important reservoirs of plant and animal life.
…"The most critically endangered species are not in Amazonia," said Priya Davidar, current ATBC president and a professor at the University of Pondicherry in India. "They're in the last surviving scraps of forest in places like the Philippines, Magagascar, India, West Africa, and the Andean Mountains of South America. These places are biodiversity hotspots—final refuges for thousands of endangered plants and animals."…
The diverse forest canopy on Barro Colorado Island, (Darien Jungle) Panama, shot by Christian Ziegler, Wikimedia Commons via a Public Library of Science Journal, Beyond Neutrality—Ecology Finds Its Niche. Gewin V, PLoS Biology Vol. 4/8/2006, e278 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040278, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.
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