Water Reserves

Greenpeace has published a report urging the UN to protect more of the world’s oceans. Today reserves only account for 0.6 percent of sea and 12 percent of land. The report states that 40 percent of oceans should be under nature reserves and stresses the need for a ban on high seas bottom trawling.

This fishing method entails great nets being dragged along the ocean floor, leaving behind the destruction of all plant and animal life and accelerating the loss of biodiversity in our seas.

Greenpeace extended the report to forests, saying that at present they account for only 10 percent of the world’s land surface, posing another major danger for the preservation of countless animal and plant species.

The report is published while the UN meeting on Biological Diversity is being held in Curitiba, Brazil. All 188 countries attending have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 (the United States is not one of these).

The conservation agreement aims to increase efforts to safeguard plant and animal species from the threat of extinction caused by human action on land and sea, finding possible strategies for sustainable development. These issues will be debated at the conference but no formal agreement will be formulated.

Sources:
Convention on Biological Diversity
www.biodiv.org
Greenpeace
www.greenpeace.com