New Online Tools Aid Haiti Relief Effort

Jakarta Globe, January 20, 2010

US President Barack Obama uses an employee's desktop computer to send a Twitter post during his visit to the Red Cross Disaster Operation Center in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Hundreds of tech volunteers spurred to action by Haiti's killer quake are adding a new dimension to disaster relief, developing new tools and services for first responders and the public in an unprecedented effort.

``It really is amazing the change in the way crisis response can be done now,'' said Noel Dickover, a Washington, D.C.-based organizer of the CrisisCamp tech volunteer movement, which is central to the Haiti effort. ``Developers, crisis mappers and even Internet-savvy folks can actually make a difference.''

Volunteers have built and refined software for tracking missing people, mapping the disaster area and enabling urgent cell phone text messaging. Organizations including the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the World Bank and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency have put the systems to use.

Tim Schwartz, a 28-year-old artist and programmer in San Diego, feared upon learning of the disaster that, with an array of social-networking sites active, crucial information about Haitian quake victims would ``go everywhere on the Internet and it would be very hard to actually find people _ and get back to their loved ones,'' he said. So Schwartz quickly e-mailed ``all the developers I'd ever worked with.''

In a few hours, he and 10 others had built www.haitianquake.com, an online lost-and-found to help Haitians in and out of the country locate missing relatives.

The database, which anyone can update, was online less than 24 hours after the quake struck, with more than 6,000 entries because Schwartz and his colleagues wrote an ``scraper'' that gathered data from a Red Cross site.

The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and others launched similar efforts. And two days later, Google had a similar tool running, PersonFinder, that the State Department promoted on its own Web site and Twitter. PersonFinder grew out of missing-persons technology developed after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005.

Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advocated online for consolidating all such tools into the Google version so the information wouldn't be stuck in competing projects.

He considers PersonFinder, which can be embedded in any Web site and as of Tuesday had more than 32,000 records, a triumph because it ``greatly increases the chances that Haitians in Haiti and abroad will be able to find each other.''

Schwartz agreed and folded his database into PersonFinder, which he thinks will become ``THE application for missing people for this disaster and all disasters in the future.''

The site has received several hundred thousand visits, said Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo. She had no data on how many people had found loved ones using the tool.

Another volunteer project forged in the quake's aftermath is a cell phone text-messaging system that has helped the U.N., Red Cross and other relief groups dispatch rescuers, food and water. Haitians needing help can send free text messages from phones on the nation's Digicel service to the number 4636.

``At least 20 people so far have been able to use this program to tell their families in the U.S. that they're OK,'' said Katie Stanton, a former Google employee working in the State Department's Office of Innovation.

The text messages are translated, categorized and ``geotagged'' by volunteers including Haitian-American members of the New York City-based Service Employees International Union. The service is being promoted on Haitian radio stations and the service has handled more than 1,000 messages since it began Saturday, said Josh Nesbit, a co-creator. He put together a similar system for hospitals in Malawi, Africa, while at Stanford University.

Chief executive Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD, a small humanitarian nonprofit that helped develop it, said by phone from the tarmac of Haiti's airport Tuesday that U.N. search-and-rescue dispatchers were at that moment mobilizing to locate a woman eight months pregnant in distress with an infection who had sent an SOS message using the system.

In another collaborative effort, the OpenStreetMap ``crisis mapping'' project, volunteers layer up-to-the-minute data (such as the location of new field hospitals and downed bridges) onto post-quake satellite imagery that companies including GeoEye and DigitalGlobe have made freely available. The digital cartography _ informed by everything from Twitter feeds to eyewitness reports _ has helped aid workers speed food, water and medicine to where it's needed most.

One Colombian rescue team leader uploaded the maps to his crew's portable GPS units before the team arrived on the scene last week, developers said. Another volunteer, Talbot Brooks of Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss., converts the maps into letter-sized documents that aid workers have been printing out before traveling to the quake zone.

``We have already been using their data in our initial post-disaster needs assessment,'' said Stuart Gill of the World Bank.

Internet social networks have helped volunteers organize intense work sessions.

CrisisCamp drew some 400 people in six cities including Washington, London and Mountain View, Calif., over the weekend to meet-ups where they devised, built and helped refine tools. Among them: a basic Creole-English dictionary for the iPhone that was delivered to Apple on Monday night for its approval.

``There was no break for lunch and people barely used the bathroom,'' said Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation, the government transparency-promoting tech nonprofit that hosted the 130 participants in the Washington session. U.N., State Department and World Bank representatives attended.

Johnson also is the coordinator for ``We Have, We Need,'' a project that was hatched in the CrisisCamp session and is about to be launched. It seeks to pair private-sector offers with needs identified by aid workers. For example, a Haitian Internet provider needs networking engineers to restore connectivity. Any volunteers willing to spend a few weeks in Port-au-Prince?

More CrisisCamps are planned this weekend in Northern California, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, Atlanta, Brooklyn, N.Y., Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles.

A week after the quake, many tech relief volunteers are still working full steam.

``These people have been awake for days,'' Csikszentmihalyi said.

AP

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UN chief "deeply saddened" to confirm death of top UN officials in Haiti

www.chinaview.cn 2010-01-17 06:39:52

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that he is "deeply saddened to confirm the tragic death" of his special representative to Haiti, Hedi Annabi, and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa.

In a statement issued at the UN Headquarters in New York, Ban said, "In every sense of the word, they gave their lives for peace."

File photo taken on Jan. 21, 2008 shows Hedi Annabi attending a press conference in Brasilia, capital of Brazil. Hedi Annabi, chief of United Nations (UN) in Haiti was found dead among debris in the quake-destroyed UN headquarters in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Chinese rescuers announced on Jan. 16, 2010. (Xinhua/Brazil News Agency)

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Also confirmed dead were the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ban said.

Annabi, a Tunisian national who was head of the UN Stability Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), was found dead among debris in the quake-destroyed UN Headquarters in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Chinese rescuers announced in the capital on Saturday.

Xinhua reporters witnessed Annabi's body being recuperated by the Chinese rescue team on Saturday afternoon. He was believed to be in a meeting with a high-ranking delegation from China when the quake struck the small island country.

"Our hearts are with them, the families and friends of Hedi, Luiz, Doug and the many other UN heroes who gave their lives for Haiti and for the highest ideals of the United Nations," said the secretary-general. "Their dearest wish, I am sure, would be that we carry forward the noble work that they and their colleagues performed so well."

Annabi was born in 1944, he joined the United Nations in 1981 and served as deputy head of UN peacekeeping operations from 1997 to 2007. He assumed his Haiti post in September 2007.

Annabi "was a true citizen of the world. The United Nations was his life and he ranked amongst its most dedicated and committed sons," Ban said. "He was passionate about its mission and its people."

Chinese peacekeeping police wait for the return of their buried colleagues in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, Jan. 16, 2010. Six bodies of eight Chinese peacekeeping police buried in the debris of Haitian earthquake have been found by the press time. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

"He gave of himself fully -- with energy, discipline and great bravery," he said. "From his start as a desk officer for Cambodia to his involvement in literally every peacekeeping operation the UN launched for over a decade, he was the gold standard of service against which all who had the privilege to work with him were measured.

"An icon of UN peacekeeping, there was no better representative of the international civil service. A mild man with the heart of alion, he is remembered by those who knew him for his dry sense of humor, his integrity and his unparalleled work ethic -- he was thefirst in and the last out every day for his entire career.

"He was proud of the UN mission in Haiti -- proud of its accomplishments in bringing stability and hope to Haiti's people, proud of his UN staff," he said.

Liu Xiangyang (L), deputy chief of the National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team, salutes to a Chinese victim in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, on Jan. 16, 2010. The bodies of all eight Chinese police officers who were buried during the Haiti quake had been found as of early Sunday morning Beijing time, the Ministry of Public Security said. (Xinhua/Yuan Man)

"Luiz Carlos da Costa, from Brazil, was for many, many years a legend of UN peacekeeping operations," the secretary-general said. "His extraordinary professionalism and dedication were matched only by his charisma and warmth, and his devotion to his many friends."

"Over decades, he brought many of the finest and most talented staff to the United Nations. He was a mentor to generations of UN staff," Ban said. "He knew them; he knew their families; and his heart was always open to hear their story and to help them."

"His legacy lives in the thousands that serve under the blue flag in every corner of the globe."

"Doug Coates was a long-serving member of the international law enforcement community," Ban said. "He was a true friend of Haiti and the United Nations. He was a great police officer who believed to his core in the importance of rule of law and justice."

Chinese peacekeeping police salute to the body of their buried colleague in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, Jan. 16, 2010. Six bodies of eight Chinese peacekeeping police buried in the debris of Haitian earthquake have been found by the press time. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

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Cultural Change, Not Handouts, Is the Long-Term Fix for Haiti

Jakarta Globe

Haitians cook outside in Port-au-Prince. (AFP Photo)

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed.

This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural-disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Barack Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim.

There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient.

Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and it is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning is futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In the United States, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with the same-old, same-old.

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist.

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Democracy is best: Mahathir

Andi Hajramurni, The Jakarta Post, Makassar | Thu, 01/14/2010 8:17 PM

Despite its many weaknesses, democracy is the best system a country can adopt to promote people’s welfare, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir said during a visit to Indonesia’s province of South Sulawesi on Thursday.

Mahathir was addressing an audience of around 1,000 at the graduate school of Hasanuddin University in Makassar. His speech concerned democracy following the recent religious turmoil in Malaysia over the use of word Allah by the Christian community.

“Is there any governance system better than that provided by the people, to people and for people?” he said at the seminar that also presented South Sulawesi Governor Syahrul Yasin Limpo.

Mahathir also warned of the possibility of a decline in democratic values as certain groups could derail it for their own vested interests.

“Even if a democracy goes well there is no guarantee it will bring prosperity to the people. Everything depends on the culture and maturity of the people in carrying out democracy,” Mahathir said.

Malaysia is a country that mixes the governance system of an institutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. It is ruled by a premier elected by the people, and its king has no real power.

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Fierce Quake Devastates Haitian Capital

The New York Times, By SIMON ROMERO and MARC LACEY, Published: January 12, 2010

Haiti’s damaged National Palace.

More Photos >

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — A fierce earthquake struck Haiti late Tuesday afternoon, causing a crowded hospital to collapse, leveling countless shantytown dwellings and bringing even more suffering to a nation that was already the hemisphere’s poorest and most disaster-prone.

The earthquake, the worst in the region in more than 200 years, left the country in a shambles. As night fell in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, fires burned near the shoreline downtown, but otherwise the city fell into darkness. The electricity was out, telephones were not working and relief workers struggled to make their way through streets blocked by rubble.

In the chaos, it was not possible for officials to determine how many people had been killed and injured, but they warned that the casualties could be substantial.

The physical toll was easier to assess. The headquarters of the United Nations mission was seriously damaged, the United Nations said in a statement, and many employees were missing. Part of the national palace had collapsed, The Associated Press reported.

A hospital collapsed in Pétionville, a hillside district in Port-au-Prince that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, a videographer for The Associated Press said. And an American government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Tequila Minsky, a photographer based in New York who was in Port-au-Prince, said that a wall at the front of the Hotel Oloffson had fallen, killing a passer-by. A number of nearby buildings had crumbled, trapping people, she said, and a Unibank bank building was badly damaged. People were screaming.

“It was general mayhem,” Ms. Minksy said.

The earthquake, with a magnitude estimated at 7.0, struck just before 5 p.m. about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, the United States Geological Survey said. Many aftershocks followed and more were expected, said David Wald, a Geological Survey seismologist.

“The main issue here will probably be shaking,” he said, “and this is an area that is particularly vulnerable in terms of construction practice, and with a high population density. There could be a high number of casualties.”

Oxfam, an antipoverty group, said that Kristie van de Wetering, a former employee based in Port-au-Prince, had described houses in rubble everywhere.

“There is a blanket of dust rising from the valley south of the capital,” agency officials said Ms. van de Wetering had told them. “We can hear people calling for help from every corner. The aftershocks are ongoing and making people very nervous.”

The earthquake could be felt across the border in the Dominican Republic, on the eastern part of the island of Hispaniola. High-rise buildings in the capital, Santo Domingo, shook and sent people streaming down stairways into the streets, fearing that the tremor could intensify.

Haiti sits on a large fault that has caused catastrophic quakes in the past, but this one was described as among the most powerful to hit the region. With many poor residents living in tin-roof shacks that sit precariously on steep ravines and with much of the construction in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country of questionable quality, the expectation was that the quake caused major damage to buildings and significant loss of life.

“Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken,” Henry Bahn, an official of the United States Department of Agriculture who was visiting Haiti, told The Associated Press. “The sky is just gray with dust.”

Haiti’s many man-made woes — its dire poverty, political infighting and proclivity for insurrection — have been exacerbated repeatedly by natural disasters. At the end of 2008, four hurricanes flooded whole towns, knocked out bridges and left a destitute population in even more desperate conditions.

The United States and other countries have devoted significant humanitarian support to Haiti, financing a large United Nations peacekeeping mission that has recently reported major gains in controlling crime. International aid has also supported an array of organizations aimed at raising the country’s dismal health and education levels.

Emergency meetings were being held in Washington, and President Obama issued a statement saying that administration officials were closely monitoring the situation.

“We stand ready to assist the people of Haiti,” Mr. Obama said.

The Caribbean is not usually considered a seismic danger zone, but earthquakes have struck here in the past.

“There’s a history of large, devastating earthquakes,” said Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, “but they’re separated by hundreds of years.”

Most of Haiti lies on the Gonave microplate, a sliver of the earth’s crust between the much larger North American plate to the north and the Caribbean plate to the south. The earthquake on Tuesday occurred when what appears to be part of the southern fault zone broke and slid.

The fault is similar in structure to the San Andreas fault that slices through California, Dr. Mann said.

Such earthquakes, which are called strike-slip, tend to be shallow and produce violent shaking at the surface.

“They can be very devastating, especially when there are cities nearby,” Dr. Mann said.

Victor Tsai, a seismologist at the National Earthquake Information Center of the United States Geological Survey, said the depth of Tuesday’s earthquake was only about six miles and the quake was a 9 on a 1-to-10 scale that measures ground shaking. “We expect substantial damage from this event,” he said.

In the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami, customers began streaming into the Louis Market shortly after news of the earthquake hit the airwaves. They were buying $5 phone cards in a desperate attempt to reach relatives in Haiti.

“Everyone who walks in here is crazy, worried, depressed,” said Myrlande Cherenfant, 20.

At the Notre Dame de Haiti Roman Catholic church, a handful of parishioners in red-cushioned seats pressed redial on their phones over and over. Some said that they had been able to get through immediately after the earthquake.

“I was able to talk to a priest in Haiti,” the Rev. Reginald Jean-Mary said. “The only word I heard was ‘catastrophe’ and then it cut off.”

He said that in a later call he was told that the cathedral in Port-au-Prince had been destroyed and that other churches had been damaged.

Jean-Robert Lafortune, executive director of the Miami-based Haitian American Grassroots Coalition, said that Haiti had endured “a cycle of natural disasters and man-made disasters, and this is one more big catastrophe.”

“We are in trauma,” he said. “We have loved ones there and many of them will be victims. We’re calling and calling, but there’s nothing on the other end.”

Simon Romero reported from Santo Domingo, and Marc Lacey from Mexico City. Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Damien Cave from Miami, and Kenneth Chang and Liz Robbins from New York.

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Members of China International Search and Rescue Team stand in a line during a departure ceremony at Beijing airport in this picture by Reuters' Jason Lee

A new approach to China

Google Blog, 1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve's blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

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A Chinese flag flies in front of the Google China headquarters in Beijing on Wednesday. Google Inc said it may pull out of China because it is no longer willing to accept censorship of its search results, in a surprise retreat from the world's largest Internet market by users. (Reuters/Jason Lee)

Biodiversity loss is 'wake-up call', warns UN

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Berlin

The Giant Jewel of West Africa is threatened by loss of forest

The UN launches the International Year of Biodiversity on Monday, warning that the ongoing loss of species affects human well-being around the world.

Eight years ago, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge will not be met.

The expansion of human cities, farming and infrastructure is the main reason.

Dignitaries including German premier Angela Merkel will speak at the launch in Berlin, with a video message from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Mr Ban is due to say that human expansion is wiping out species at about 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate, and that "business as usual is not an option".

The Secretary-General is expected to argue that the failure to protect biodiversity "should be a wake-up call", leading to effective ways of protecting forests, watersheds, coral reefs and other ecosystems.

The UN says that as natural systems such as forests and wetlands disappear, humanity loses the services they currently provide for free, such as the purification of air and water, protection from extreme weather events and the provision of materials for shelter and fire.

The rate of species loss leads some biologists to say that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction, the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts.

Cash log

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was agreed at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, alongside the climate change convention.

But it acquired its key global pledge during the Johannesburg summit of 2002, when governments agreed to achieve a "significant reduction" in the rate of biological diversity by 2010.

Conservation organisations acknowledge that despite some regional successes, the target is not going to be met; some analyses suggest that nature loss is accelerating rather than decelerating.

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

"We are facing an extinction crisis," said Jane Smart, director of the biodiversity conservation group with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"The loss of this beautiful and complex natural diversity that underpins all life on the planet is a serious threat to humankind now and in the future."

A large on-going UN-sponsored study into the economics of biodiversity suggests that deforestation alone costs the global economy $2-5 trillion each year.

In his speech at Monday's event, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Achim Steiner is due to highlight problems caused by invasive species, and the potential for ecosystems such as forests and wetlands to absorb and store carbon from the air.

The UN hopes some kind of legally-binding treaty to curb biodiversity loss can be agreed at the CBD summit, held in Japan in October.

One element is due to be a long-awaited protocol under which the genetic resources of financially-poor but biodiversity-rich nations can be exploited in a way that brings benefits to all.

However, given the lack of appetite for legally-binding environmental agreements that key countries displayed at last month's climate summit in Copenhagen, it is unclear just what kind of deal might materialise on biodiversity.

Political football

The UN has been pursuing new ways of raising public awareness on the issue, including a collaboration with the Cameroon football team taking part in the African Nations Cup finals.

Many environment organisations will be running special programmes and mounting events during the year.

"The big opportunity during the International Year of Biodiversity is for governments to do for biodiversity what they failed to do for climate change in Copenhagen," said Simon Stuart, a senior science advisor to Conservation International and chair of IUCN's Species Survival Commission.

"They have the chance to make a major difference; and key to this will be halting species extinctions, the most irreversible aspect of biodiversity loss."

WWF is highlighting 10 species it considers especially threatened, ranging from commercially significant ones such as bluefin tuna to the Pacific walrus and the monarch butterfly.

In the UK, the Natural History Museum (NHM) is asking every citizen to "do one thing for biodiversity" in 2010.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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