Publisher : Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Place of publication :
Publication year : 2005
Thematic : Conservation
Language : English
Note
The German Advisory Council for Global Change (WBGU) recognises biodiversity
damage and loss as one of the key problems of global change, which, in turn, is
rated by leading scientists as the greatest global ecological danger. The global relevance
of this problem is emphasised by the fact that one of the three international
agreements signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was exclusively targeting at the conservation
and the sustainable use of biodiversity. So far, the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) is the most comprehensive regime of regulations for the protection
of biological diversity under international law. Like other environmentally related
agreements of international scope, the CBD is regarded as an initial milestone towards
a new ecological world order and is seen as a substantial element of a new
world order. The concept of sustainability, in which the CBD is explicitly integrated,
liberates the ecological question from its isolation and makes it an integral part of
the global societal development. This poses a considerable challenge to scientific
research; after all, the point is to identify determinants of vastly complex systems
– ecological, economic and social systems alike – and to develop suggestions how
to network them both locally and internationally in a justifiable way.
Science concerned with the global problem of the loss of biological diversity
faces the following demands: it needs to be internationally oriented and needs to
emphasise the interconnection of disciplines of social, economic and natural sciences.
The latter can be achieved by the disciplines being concertedly geared to a
real-life problem which requires an interdisciplinary endeavour. Results provided
by natural sciences, e.g., conservation biology, ecology, agricultural and forest sciences,
have to be interlinked with those provided by social sciences, e.g., law, economics,
political science, ethics and sociology.
In October 2000 the University of Göttingen, Germany, launched an interdisciplinary
graduate research programme entitled »Valuation and conservation of biodiversity:
implementation of nature conservation strategies within the framework
of the Convention on Biological Diversity.« This programme was designed to explicitly
overcome the deficiencies of the German internationally oriented biodiversity
related research criticised by the WBGU. Not only did the programme take care of an interconnectedness of the various disciplines engaged in the programme but
it explicitly took a perspective centred on social sciences. This approach was different
to those of projects which had been funded by the German Research Foundation
(DFG) in the frame of the expired biodiversity related priority programme. An
analysis of the problems of and the perspectives on the conservation of biological
diversity connected to the implementation of the CBD was at the heart of the graduate
research programme. As the area of regulation of the CBD is markedly large,
the subject of the programme had to be confined in a way appropriate for interdisciplinary
problem-oriented research. It is against this background that the subject
was limited to the »in-situ conservation« codified in article 8 of the CBD, which
promotes the strategy of establishing a system of protected areas.
Conserving biodiversity by establishing a system of protected areas is an element
of national nature protection strategies and takes place under the conditions
given by the CBD. Thus, the scientific questions of the graduate programme were
related to two layers:
In the global layer general issues – issues that are concerned with the CBD as a
whole – were dealt with. These issues are independent of concrete considerations
about national implementation strategies and point beyond national borders. They
link national implementation strategies to each other and are concerned with the
background information and the framework for their development.
In the national layer problems of and perspectives on the implementation of
the CBD were to be analysed in regards to national conditions and frameworks
found in selected nations. As developing and developed nations differ in various
aspects – their area of unspoilt nature and general ecologic conditions as well as
their economic, social and political-institutional potentials for implementation –
one developing (Guatemala) and one developed country (Germany) were included into the analysis.
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Keywords : SIT
Encoded by : Pauline Carmel Joy Eje
