Biodiversity Hotspots

The term "biodiversity hotspots" has become a fad in ecological vocabulary; when talking about conservation or research, there is always an emphasis on the hotspots. The concept isn't all that old either, it came into existence when Norman Myers coined the term in 1988. According to Conservation International (CI), the term ecological hotspots means areas with the richest and most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life, including endemic species. In 2000, there were 25 hotspots that were identified (the list available here), today Conservation International has demarked 34 ecoregions around the globe as areas that have lost more than 70% of their diversity, classifying them as biodiversity hotspots. These regions were recognized so that they would receive priority in conservation strategies, to be able to monitor extinction rates in the areas and to save as much of the original biodiverstiy as possible. (Details about the hotspots here and the map showing all hotspots is available in PDF format here)

Huge amounts of funds are available for anyone interested in conservation work in these regions. CI set up CEPF, the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, that provides grants to researchers interested in working to save the biodiversity in 25 of the 34 ecological hotplates. Another of the biggest players handling funds for these areas is the MacArthur Foundation. More than 750 million US dollars has been invested in the last 15 years.

The concept of hotspots, though brilliant and allowing the easy classification of areas according to priority, it sparked off a debate that took into account the fact that not all species were given equal importance, nor were all environmental and socio-economic factors taken into consideration during the demarkation of the hotspots. The debate began with the mere definition, Myers wanted to target areas so that the maximum number of species could be saved. But is many areas there are some species that are locally abundant and on an individual basis they receive less attention. Moreover, when the hotspots receive the bulk of the attention, other areas that are also diversity rich go completely or partially ignored, or cannot be sustained for the lack of funds. Even limited resources and time were not enough to pacify some of the critics. Conserving diversity in some of the hotspots was very successful, one example would be the success story of Madagascar, where the president Marc Ravalomanana pledged in 2003 that he would triple the island's protected area network. Since then more than 36 million US dollars has been raised to save the island's plants and animals, most of which are endemic. But Southeast Asia's Sundaland hotspot—which includes the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo—has deteriorated rapidly in the face of unabated commercial logging and agriculture expansion. According to some scientists the hotspot approach failed to take into consideration ecosystem services that are essential to human survival, it should include concepts such as carbon storage, fisheries, clean water supply and agricultural systems. In an article published in a 2001 issue of Global Ecology and Biogeography, the authors, Paul Jepson and Susan Canney, argue that the concept of conservation is based on human intentions, "a social movement working to develop and maintain values in society concerning the human-nature relationship". They take the society's approach to the debate. According to them, although nature reserves prove to be valuable, society tends to have a more eclectic view. The hotspot approach, they say, has a very limited ability aethetically and ethically to protect diversity spatially and that this will not provide a 'blueprint' for future strategies. It is the difference in the cultures of the peoples of the various hotspots that will not allow this holistic approach to nature conservation.

Failure to protect even a few of the hotspots would, in all probability, reduce the world's biodiversity by more than 50%. The statistics of 2003 are grave. Extinction rates are on the climb, despite all efforts to save the earth's biodiversity. The World Conservation Union's Red List assessed 40,000 species worldwide, of which 12,000 faced extinction. These included one in 8 birds, a quarter of all mammals and 13% of the world's flowering plants. Hotspots will enable the conservation of a number of species locally, but there doesn't seem to be enough to monitor extinction rates in other areas.

For more on the hotspots see Nature Conservancy's "Last Great Places" at www.nature.org
More on Indian hotspots on this blog soon.

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