-to be funded through Norway forest deal
GUYANA is to establish a centre for biodiversity research, which will be managed according to international standards, and will include a teaching faculty, said President Bharrat Jagdeo.
He gave the commitment during a ceremony held on Friday in his honour for being a recipient of the 2010 Champions of the Earth Award, which he accepted in Seoul, Korea on April 22.
The President said the centre will be funded through the US$30 million expected shortly  from Guyana’s Memorandum of Understanding with Norway.
“We have set aside money to develop an international centre for biodiversity research, and it will not only have scientists working to look at the flora and fauna and looking at the tens of thousands of products that we can make from the rainforests without destroying them, but it will also have a teaching faculty,” he said. He said, too, that the facility will be of a world standard level.
The Guyana Chronicle understands that the centre will be located at the Turkeyen Campus of the University of Guyana, but not much detail of the plan is available. There will be about nine priority areas that will be the focus of the centre’s research. According to the President, Government will be passing legislation to ensure that Guyana benefits from any findings of the work of the centre.
Guyana is a country rich in biodiversity; from thousands of species of flora and fauna to a range of natural habitats including forests, mangroves, savannahs and wetlands. Many species of plants and animals could be found in the Iwokrama rainforest reserve and in other parts of the country.
But despite the work of many organisations in Guyana, the country still suffers from the loss of biodiversity. Numerous newspaper reports detail jaguars being killed by humans when the animals’ habitat crosses that of Man.
A recent report on the state of the world’s biodiversity says that natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods across the planet are at risk of rapid degradation and collapse unless conservation action is taken.
The report, the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook, produced by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB), says that the world has failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.
According to the report, none of the twenty-one subsidiary targets accompanying the overall 2010 biodiversity targets have been definitively reached globally, although some have been partially or locally achieved. The report says that 10 of the 15 headline indicators developed by the CBD show trends unfavourable for biodiversity, and that no government claims to have completely met the 2010 biodiversity target at the national level, and around one-fifth state explicitly that it has not been met.
“Species that have been assessed for extinction risk are on average moving closer to extinction, with amphibians facing the greatest risk and coral species deteriorating most rapidly in status,” a press release accompanying the report said.
Again, according to said report, the abundance of vertebrate species, based on assessed populations, fell by nearly one-third on average between 1970 and 2006, and continues to fall globally, with especially severe declines in the tropics and among freshwater species.
“Natural habitats in most parts of the world continue to decline in extent and integrity, notably freshwater wetlands, sea ice habitats, salt marshes, coral reefs, seagrass beds and shellfish reefs; although there has been significant progress in slowing the rate of loss of tropical forests and mangroves, in some regions,” it says.
The five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change), the report says, are either constant or increasing in intensity.
According to the accompanying press release, the Outlook will be key in the discussions at a special high level segment of the United Nations General Assembly on September 22.
“The Outlook warns that massive further loss of biodiversity is becoming increasingly likely, and with it, a severe reduction of many essential services to human societies as several ‘tipping points’ are approached, in which ecosystems shift to alternative, less productive states from which it may be difficult or impossible to recover,” the release stated.