coral.smallUnited Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warns Monday that human expansion is wiping out species at around 1,000 times the “natural” rate as the UN launches the International Year of Biodiversity in Berlin.

Ban will call the failure of governments to prevent biodiversity loss a “wake-up call” that should lead to new commitments to protect forests, oceans, coral reefs and other ecosystems.

Governments pledged eight years ago to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 but that target has been missed because of the expansion of human cities, farming and infrastructure.

“The big opportunity during the International Year of Biodiversity is for governments to do for biodiversity what they failed to do for climate change in Copenhagen,” said Simon Stuart Conservation International/IUCN.

Biologists fear Earth is currently in the middle of its sixth “great extinction”, with the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts and ice ages.

“We are facing an extinction crisis,” said Jane Smart, director of the biodiversity conservation group with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“The loss of this beautiful and complex natural diversity that underpins all life on the planet is a serious threat to humankind now and in the future.”

The UN hopes some kind of legally-binding treaty to curb biodiversity loss can be agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Japan in October.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Conservation, Extinct, Ocean, Rivers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.