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Loss of habitats irreplaceable, warn
scientists
Wednesday August 01, 2012 10:34:26 AM,
IANS
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Sydney: It is hard to
replace a lost habitat without losing species, even though the
goal may be laudable, warn scientists.
"There's been a lot of talk among policymakers about 'offsets',
meaning that if you damage or lose the environment in one place
you compensate by restoring or protecting an equivalent area
somewhere else," explains study author Richard Hobbs, professor at
ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED).
With up to a billion hectares of wilderness likely to be cleared
to feed the world in the coming half century and an area the size
of China devoured by cities, leading environmental scientists are
urging caution over the extent to which lost eco-systems can be
replaced or restored.
A team including researchers from (CEED) has advised governments
worldwide to think twice before assuming an environment lost to
development can easily be replaced elsewhere, the journal
Biological Conservation reported.
"There's been a lot of talk among policymakers about 'offsets',
meaning that if you damage or lose the environment in one place,
you compensate by restoring or protecting an equivalent area
somewhere else," Hobbs was quoted as saying in a CEED statement.
Currently there are more than 64 such programmes under way around
the world and policy support for the solution is gathering steam,
"But the science to date suggests it is very hard to replace a
lost environment in another locality so there is no net loss of
species," Hobbs said.
"Current conservation policies talk glibly about offsets and seem
to promise much - but it isn't clear they really appreciate how
difficult and expensive it can be to translocate a whole ecosystem
with all its species and their relationships," he said.
Martine Maron from The University of Queensland, who led the
study, said: "In some cases, we are trying to use offsets to
replace centuries-old trees. For some species, the long wait
before newly-planted trees can provide food or nesting hollows for
fauna means that offsetting is a very high-risk strategy."
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