ATBC 2008 - News

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation

Declaration of Marburg : Scientists Say Vanishing Species must be Key Part of International Carbon

Scientists Say Vanishing Species must be Key Part of International Carbon Trading. Two leading scientific organizations today urged international carbon traders to help save some of the world’s most endangered forests and wildlife. Meeting this week in Marburg, Germany, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and the Society for Tropical Ecology (GTOE) jointly issued a “Marburg Declaration” that highlighted potentially serious weaknesses in current efforts to slow global warming and tropical deforestation. “If we’re going to limit harmful climate change, we simply must reduce the rampant destruction of tropical forests, which spews 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” said Scientists. “But it’s not enough just to reduce carbon emissions—we also have to save imperiled species.”

The problem, say the scientists, is that international carbon traders will often focus on protecting disappearing forests where land is cheapest, such as in the Brazilian Amazon. Under agreements to be negotiated this December at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, such carbon trading could soon amount to billions of dollars each year. “The most critically endangered species are not only in Amazonia,” said William Laurance, a former ATBC president and a professor at James Cook University in Australia. “They’re also in the last surviving scraps of forest in places like the Philippines, Madagascar, India, West Africa, and the Andean Mountains of South America. These places are biodiversity hotspots—final refuges for thousands of endangered plants and animals.”

“There’s enormous potential to help protect vanishing forests with carbon money, but if we’re not careful we could squander our chance to save critically endangered wildlife,” said Scientists. “We urge all nations and corporations to invest in carbon funds to help preserve disappearing forests,” said Manfred Niekisch, president of the GTOE and director of the Frankfurt Zoo in Germany. “But when you do so, pay a little extra so you’re protecting the most imperiled habitats. That way we can slow global warming and also save some of the most amazing and imperiled wildlife on earth.” Declaration fo Marburg (pdf en-fr) at ATBC website.