Conservation and Use of Biodiversity

Abstract

It was only recently that people began to see the global loss of biodiversity as a serious environmental problem. In particular it was at the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro where the conservation of biodiversity became an international issue. Prior to that, the matter of biodiversity was little more than a concern among certain small groups of experts like biologists, environmentalists, and environmental NGOs, who had from the 1970s been sounding warnings on the impending crisis of biodiversity loss, though the issue rarely got attention from the general public. But starting in 1992 conservation of biodiversity became a foreign policy issue, and many governments made it one of their top priority issues in their political agendas or in dealings with other countries. This change in the issue’s status came about from 1990 to 1992 during the two years of negotiations for the Biodiversity Convention. In the course of those negotiations it became clear that biodiversity is a natural resource with exceedingly great actual and potential economic value.