Suchergebnisse

This study suggests that protecting the vast amount of carbon stored above ground in the forests of indigenous and protected lands -- totaling 55% of the Amazon -- is critical to the stability of the global climate as well as to the cultural identity of forest-dwelling peoples and the health of the ecosystems they inhabit. "We see, for example, that the territories of Amazonian indigenous peoples store almost a third of the region's aboveground carbon on just under a third of the land area," said Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) scientist Wayne Walker. "That is more forest carbon than is contained in some of the most carbon-rich tropical countries including Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Yet the authors also find that nearly 20% of tropical forests across Amazonia are at risk from legal and illegal logging, construction of new roads and dams, and the expansion of commercial agriculture, mining, and petroleum industries, pressures which are exacerbated in many countries because governments have failed to recognize or enforce indigenous land rights.

Abstract In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.