The UN and Extinction

No, it's not the UN that's headed for extinction. Not yet, anyway. Instead, the UN is using species extinction as an excuse to grab more cash.

Reuters reported today on a UN report released today by the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity.

Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.

According to a "Red List" compiled by the World Conservation Union, 844 animals and plants are known to have gone extinct in the last 500 years, ranging from the dodo to the Golden Toad in Costa Rica. It says the figures are probably a big underestimate.

And of course, humans are responsible: Too many people --> Too little habitat --> Too many extinctions.

I've heard of the dodo. It died off in 1681 as a result of Portuguese traders eating most of them, followed by the establishment of a Dutch penal colony, with its accompanying pigs, monkeys and stowaway rats killing off the rest (see Bagheera for details).

The Golden Toad in Costa Rica was news to me, so I looked it up (see Bagheera for details and see BBC Sci/Tech for other details). The Reuters article seems to imply that the presumed extinction of this toad was caused by humans. The BBC article says it was climate change driving temperatures up, which caused the cloud cover of the toad's habitat to move to higher elevations, depriving the toad of its habitat. But Bagheera's explanation says that in 1987 a researcher saw hundreds of golden toads mating. In 1988, when she went back to study them some more, there were only 10 toads--not mating. In 1989, they could only find one golden toad, and nobody has seen one since.

Since when did climate change happen in one year? How could humans cause this drastic a population drop? Unless it was the researcher herself who messed with the toad's environment somehow, maybe by stepping on some of the eggs or on the mud, compressing it too much for egg-laying purposes.

Back to the UN report (emphasis added):

It urged better efforts to safeguard habitats ranging from deserts to jungles and better management of resources from fresh water to timber. About 12 percent of the earth's land surface is in protected areas, against just 0.6 percent of the oceans.

It said there was "reasonable progress" toward global cooperation but "limited" advances in ensuring enough cash and research. It estimated that annual aid to help slow biodiversity losses sank to $750 million from $1 billion since 1998.

With the UN, the bottom line is always twofold: "Give us more control, and give us more cash." But their record is one of out-of-control bureaucracy coupled with corrupt and/or unaccountable cash handlers.

If they want more money, let them start by asking Portugal and the Netherlands, since they were the ones who killed off the dodo. Then they can ask that researcher what she did to the golden toad.

But leave us out of it.