Knight calls for migratory protection

Biodiversity Minister Jim Knight has called for greater international protection to be extended to migratory species, to protect them from the potentially devastating effects of climate change, development and poverty.

"We must ensure that, where natural resources are necessarily used, such use is sustainable,"said Mr. Knight, in his keynote address opening the eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species in Nairobi. "We must invest scarce resources in ways that will produce the greatest benefit both for people and the environment. This is the only means to ensure we can leave to our children a natural heritage of which we can be proud. Otherwise, we are squandering their rightful inheritance.”

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the 92 partners (governments and NGOs) agreed to significantly reduce the level of biodiversity degradation by 2010. Mr. Knight also stressed the importance of looking beyond the upcoming target date, towards the issue in 2015 – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals.

"We are facing some of the most critical threats to the planet in human history. The greatest is climate change and associated desertification. We are also presented with problems caused by the unsustainable use of natural resources, underpinned by crippling poverty in much of the developing world," he added.