Ecological and Economic Impacts
of Aquatic Biodiversity Conservation
by: Nels Johnson
Growing water scarcity
and alarming declines in aquatic biodiversity indicate that water policies
in most of the world are failing to protect life's most vital resource.
Water is certain to be a major topic of discussion at next year's Rio
+10 Summit and seems likely to join climate change as a perennial topic
at global gatherings of environmental policy-makers. Two questions that
should be prominent at these events will be addressed in this presentation.
First, where is water scarce and how will this change over time? Second,
what changes in water management can address the needs of people of
nature?
Ecological and Economic Impacts
of Aquatic Biodiveristy Conservation
by: Lauretta Burke
The World Resources
Institute, in collaboration with regional partners, is currently conducting
an analysis and data consolidation effort examining threats to coral
reefs in Southeast Asia. This regional-extent project is a more detailed
follow-up to the global Reefs at Risk analysis completed in 1998. Like
the global project, Reefs at Risk in Southeast Asia (RRSEA), aims to
compensate for the lack of detailed information on the status of coral
reefs. RRSEA has four primary goals:
1) Improve the base of information available for examining the threats,
status, value, and protection of coral reefs within Southeast Asia,
through collecting, revising and integrating information;
2) Model threats to coral reefs based upon population and development
patterns, landuse change, and the location and intensity of certain
activities known to degrade coral reefs;
3) Develop a geographic information system (GIS)-based tool for more
local-level evaluation of development scenarios and related implications
for coral reef health and associated economic implications;
4) Raise awareness about human threats to coral reefs through wide dissemination
of integrated data sets, model results, a published report, and the
GIS planing tool.
The RRSEA project
is implemented by WRI, in collaboration with over 20 international,
national and local partner institutions, with support from USAID. The
presentation will focus on the threat analysis approach and modeling
results for SE Asia. All project results and data will be available
from on the Internet, www.wri.org, upon completion of the project in
the fall of 2001. With support from USAID, a similar project will begin
in the Caribbean later this year.
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