Environment     

Expansion of cropland fuels biodiversity loss

Xinhua, January 17, 2013

• Kenya's environmental watchdog said the increasing loss of the country's rich biodiversity which provides livelihood to a majority of the population is being caused by increasing population which has led to the encroachment of forests and wetlands.

  Due to the effects of climate change, people are moving from the agricultural highlands to the arid and semi arid lands with negative consequences, National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) Director of Research Dr Kennedy Ondimu said recently.

  Kenya's rich biodiversity is also home to abundant wildlife resources, which is the pillar of the country's tourism sector, he said.

  The UNEP-backed report also warned that areas of high biodiversity value may also be vulnerable to similar land conversion patterns in the future. These include priority conservation areas such as Frontier Forests and High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas, which have previously been identified as having "low vulnerability."

  The report highlighted urgent need for more effective sustainability standards and policies to address production and consumption of tropical commodities, including robust land-use planning, the establishment of new protected areas, projects to support forests (such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD+) in places agriculture has not yet reached, and the reduction or elimination of incentives for land- demanding bio-energy feed stocks.

  IPBES, which was established in April 2012, creates a mechanism recognized by both scientific and policy communities to synthesize, review, assess and critically evaluate relevant information and knowledge generated worldwide.

  There are also many other smaller areas which are important for biodiversity and which have high cultivation potential, such as on the fringes of the Amazon basin, in the Paraguayan Chaco, and in the savanna woodlands of the Sahel and East Africa.

  UNEP will launch later this month a campaign against food waste, which also aims to lessen the pressure on land as yet unused for agriculture.

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