UN Opens Biodiversity Year with Plea to Save World's Life-Supporting Ecosystems

The United Nations is marking 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. The message for this year will focus on raising awareness to generate public pressure for action by the world's decision makers.

The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity summarized the year's message as: "Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is essential to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide us all with health, wealth, food, fuel and the vital services our lives depend on. Human activity is causing the diversity of life on Earth to be lost at a greatly accelerated rate. These losses are irreversible, will impoverish us all and damage the life support systems we rely on every day. But we can prevent them."

The official launch will take place on January 11 and will be followed by major events on the 21st and 22nd of January in the Paris headquarters of UNESCO which will bring together heads of states and representatives.

For details, see the story at http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=606&ArticleID=6439&l=en