Posted in Library, News & Publications on 02/8/12
Toronto Star, The Scary New Math of Warming; published 21 November 2009 by Peter Gorrie A recent environmental summit set ambitious new targets for reducing greenhouse gasses. If new environmental campaigns take hold, you'll hear a lot about two numbers during the next few months. If they succeed, you could find yourself living, and thinking, differently. The numbers are 350 and 50. The first is a target for reducing the...
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 02/8/12
Conservation Beyond Crisis Management: A Conservation-Matrix Model A Discussion Paper for the Canadian BEACONs Project In many regions of the world, failure to plan effectively for conservation of biological diversity has led to irretrievable losses of ecosystem structure and function or, at least, a need for expensive and risky restoration efforts. In relatively intact systems, planning pro-actively for biological conservation requires a systems approach that integrates the fields of conservation...
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 02/8/12
Conservation Targets: Do They Help? By Michael E. Soulé & M. A. Sanjayan; Science, New Series, Vol. 279, No. 5359. (Mar. 27, 1998), pp. 2060-2061. The most irreversible environmental problem of this era is the projected rapid loss of biodiversity, including the disappearance of up to half the world's species. In response, many international commissions and nature conservation organizations have called for the near-term protection of at least 10 or...
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 02/8/12
Center for Large Landscape Conservation; Literature Review on Select Topics in Landscape Conservation; May 27, 2010 How much is enough? What is the minimum area required to ensure the maintenance of biodiversity in an area? A 10 percent (or 12%) conservation target of land area in each nation (Myers 1979, Miller 1984, Soule and Sanjayan 1998) is frequently cited and has been recurrently used in setting policy, though with little...
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Posted in News & Publications, Papers & Publications on 01/20/12
We Need to Scale Up Marine Protection: A Global Perspective (International Journal of Wilderness, December, 2011, www.ijw.org ) Cyril F. Kormos (Vice President for Policy, The WILD Foundation; World Commission for Protected Areas, Co-Chair, North America) News reports of the declining health of our planet’s oceans have become sadly routine: from dwindling blue fin tuna stocks to the deepwater oil spills, and from reports of retreating sea ice in the...
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Posted in News & Publications, Papers & Publications on 01/20/12
A New Spatial Perspective for a Healthy Planet (International Journal of Wilderness, December, 2011, www.ijw.org ); Dr Magnus Sylven (environmental consultant; Co-Chair, WILD10, the 10th World Wilderness Congress; former Director, WWF Europe) Human impact on the world since the Industrial Revolution has been so comprehensive that it has ushered in a new geological epoch, which scientists have called the Anthropocene (Smith 2008). Impacts on the Earth’s physical, chemical, and biological...
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 01/20/12
Article by: William Laurance From Brazil to Borneo, new roads are being built into tropical forests at a dizzying pace, putting previously intact wilderness at risk. If we hope to preserve rainforests, a leading researcher says, new strategies must be adopted to limit the number of roads and reduce their impacts. >>Read the full article from Yale Environment 360
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 12/21/11
PREVENTING THE END OF THE WORLD'S WILDLIFE MIGRATIONS THROUGH ECOLOGICAL NETWORKS This rapid-response assessment was recently produced by GRID-Arendal, an official United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) collaborating centre, supporting informed decision making and awareness-raising through: * Environmental information management and assessment * Capacity building services * Outreach and communication tools, methodologies and products PREFACE Through the air, over land and in water, over ten thousand species numbering millions of animals travel around the...
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Posted in Library, News & Publications on 09/26/11
A short list of marine conservation reference texts. Barr, B. 2007. Ocean Wilderness: Interesting Idea or Ecological Imperative? International Journal of Wilderness Special Issue: The Wild Planet Project. Dudley, N. (Editor). 2008. Guidelines for Applying Protected Area Management Categories. IUCN. Gland, Switzerland, IUCN. x + 86pp. Halpern, B.S., Walbridge, S., Selkoe, K.A. Kappel, C.V., Micheli, F, D’Agrosa, C., Bruno, J.F., Casey, K.S., Ebert, C., Fox, H.E., Fujita, R., Heinemann, D.,...
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Posted in Blog, News & Publications on 08/24/11
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia Canada, is planning the management strategy for its regional parks and trails for the next ten years (2011-2020). Like many cities of its size, Victoria's plan consider natural and biological values, cultural heritage, recreation opportunities, population growth, climate change, etc. What is unique about this plan is its central focus on connectivity, ecosystem health an alignment with the Nature Needs Half vision. A brief...
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Posted in Blog, News & Publications on 08/11/11
"Protected areas are a valuable tool in the fight to preserve biodiversity. We need them to be well managed, and we need more of them, but they alone cannot solve our biodiversity problems," Camilo Mora of University of Hawaii at Mora. Dr. Mora and Dr. Peter F. Sale, Assistant Director of the United Nations University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health recently published an assessment in the 28 July 2011...
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Posted in Blog, Library, News & Publications on 07/7/11
The terminology of conservation can be confusing. Endless acronyms and very specific terms that only the 'specialists' can decode. For Nature Needs Half, we use the protected area categories as defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN categories define protected areas according to the management objectives, but don't always mesh with in-country or local definitions and terminology. There are many other terms to define important biodiversity...
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