The United Nations on Monday painted a "dire" picture of Planet Earth's state of biodiversity, warning that countries should either address it quickly or face the irreversible losses.

"Natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods across the planet are at risk of rapid degradation and collapse, unless there is swift, radical and creative action to conserve and sustainably use the variety of life on Earth," the world body said in a new report, the third edition of Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3).

The report warns that massive further loss of biodiversity is becoming increasingly likely, and with it, a severe reduction of many essential services to human societies as several "tipping points" are approached.

Deflin Ganapin, global manager of the UN's Global Environmental Facility (GEF), explained that the "tipping points" are "the stage where the loss is so much that the loss becomes rapid, long- lasting and very difficult to reverse."

DIRE PICTURE

"Biodiversity is the foundation of human development," Ganapin told reporters. "The report provides very dire projections of the state of biodiversity globally."

These include a shrinking Amazon forest, "with consequences for the global climate, regional rainfall and widespread species extinctions"; the shift of freshwater bodies to eutrophic or algae- dominated states, "leading to widespread fish kills"; and multiple collapses of coral reef ecosystems, "threatening the livelihood of hundreds of millions of species directly dependent on coral reef resources."

Studies show that the loss of biodiversity is more than 1,000 times the rate of regular evolutionary loss, which means that biodiversity loss is much higher than the nature can produce or create new species to adapt to new environment.

Ganapin said that many of the world's wetlands are being lost, citing the example of Mangroves, which are disappearing rather rapidly, especially in Asia.

"The problem is that we are actually losing them faster that we can really study them," he said. "In fact, that's the tragedy of biodiversity loss."

"In many cases before we even knew the species are there, they would have already been lost. It's like before you even read the books in a library, you have already lost the books, or burned down them," he added.

ISSUE OF SURVIVAL

The consequence of biodiversity loss is directly impacting the livelihoods of people in the developing countries, which both possess abundant natural resources and tend to be prone to lose them.

"The issue of biodiversity conservation is an issue of survival, " Ganapin said. "Developing countries benefit directly if there is biodiversity conservation, and suffer greatly if there is biodiversity loss."

Many of the poor communities in developing countries directly depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, namely, farmers, fishermen and indigenous peoples, he said, adding even the cultures of the indigenous peoples are affected by biodiversity loss.

"Developing countries must primarily conserve biodiversity for their own benefits," he stressed.

In rich countries, people could also benefit from conservation of biodiversity. A case study shows that, in New York, by spending 1 billion dollars to protect the Catskill/Delaware watershed, 4 to 6 billions dollars would be saved because that watershed would provide for the water needs of New Yorkers without the necessity of building costly filtration plants.

NEW STRATEGY

"All of these problems of biodiversity conservation could be solved with urgent action," Ganapin said. "What we need to do now is to develop a strategy, a much better strategy for reducing biodiversity loss."

The report notes that the linked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed by policymakers with equal priority and in close coordination, if the most severe impacts of each are to be avoided.

"If you link biodiversity to climate change, some of the solutions to climate change issues that we have now are actually also solutions to biodiversity loss," Ganapin said.

"The strategy to conserve biodiversity is on the shoulders of both national governments and in many cases also of nongovernmental organizations," Ganapin said.

But the report says that the efforts made so far have not been enough, partly because of the "difficult conflict between economic development and conservation," and also the difficulty of consumption patterns.

"If we are wasteful of energy use, water use, then no matter how many programs we put in a country for biodiversity conservation, it will not be sufficient," Ganapin said.

"If we can only summon even a fraction of what we put in to solve the financial crisis, we would have been able to avoid a much more serious and fundamental breakdown in the Earth's life support systems," he added.