Translate: Chinese (simple) | Chinese (traditional) | Dutch | French | German | Greek | Italian | Japanese | Korean | Portuguese | Russian | Spanish
Earth People Logo
Earth Rights Institute -- The Earth Belongs to Everyone
About Us Programs / Projects News & Events Publications Support Us Contact Us

THE COASTAL COALITION: Proposal to Establish a United Nations Global Habitat Conservation Fund

Anchorage, Alaska USA January, 2000
Highlights:
  • Despite international and national efforts, the world is continuing to lose natural habitat - forests, wetlands, grasslands, mangroves, etc. - at unprecedented rates. This is one of the most consequential issues of our time.

  • As a result of this ongoing habitat loss, an estimated 50 - 150 species become extinct every day, forever eroding the biological wealth of Earth.

  • Underlying causes for this continuing, cumulative loss of habitat are complex, vary from region to region, and may take decades to resolve.

  • An immediate mechanism must be established to protect critical ecological habitat, such as identified biodiversity "hotspots" and other threatened ecoregions, while underlying issues are addressed.

  • In addition to debt relief, there is urgent need to establish a $5 billion - $10 billion / year Global Habitat Conservation Fund (GHCF) within the United Nations specifically to pay for habitat protection.

  • In its present form, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is not able to provide the level of habitat protection necessary due to its breadth, development mandate, and provision just of incremental project costs.

  • The GHCF should be funded by a nominal (0.5% - 1%) global tax on fossil energy resource extraction - at just $1/ton of oil equivalent, the Fund could raise over $7 billion/year from coal, gas, and oil production. This would amount to less than 1 cent / gallon of gasoline, for instance.

  • A potential model for the GHCF is the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the United States, which purchases habitat protections with federal revenues from offshore oil development.

  • TIME IS RUNNING OUT - the establishment of the Fund must become a priority agenda item for consideration at the UN Millennium Assembly and UN Millennium Summit in September, 2000.

The Habitat / Biodiversity Crisis

As we enter the 21st century, it is an appropriate time to address an issue of critical importance to the future of all humanity - the protection of the remaining natural habitat of our planet. Below, we outline the idea and need for the establishment within the United Nations of a Global Habitat Conservation Fund, modeled perhaps after the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the United States. We would appreciate your help in advancing the concept within the United Nations, member governments, and world industry.

The recent century has seen remarkable advances in many criteria by which we measure human progress - health, science, equality, technology, commerce, democracy. At the same time however, we have seen a dramatic threat develop that is simply unprecedented in our collective history - the continual, cumulative loss of natural habitat. The UN should be proud of its many historic accomplishments in the arena of global habitat protection, but when we honestly measure our efforts against the alarming realities of the continuing loss of natural habitat, it is evident that we are losing ground in this crisis, not gaining.

A poignant example of this problem is that of the continuing loss of forest habitat and the resulting biodiversity crisis. As Earth has lost about half of its original forest cover, and only about 20% remains today as large, relatively undisturbed frontier forests, the loss of biological and genetic wealth due to species extinction has soared. Other rapidly shrinking habitats include grasslands (savannas, prairies), wetlands, coral reefs, and mangroves. Some ecologists (Myers, et.al. 1999) have estimated that as many as 600,000 species have become extinct just since the 'biotic holocaust' began about 50 years