Biodiversity

Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the Earth's greatest wealth. Billions of years ago began the evolutionary process that created the variety of life on the planet today, the conservation of which is one of humanity's biggest challenges.

The world's governments were convened to make an effort to reduce threats to this great wealth in the Convention on Biological Diversity, drafted in 1992. But achieving the goals stipulated by the treaty is still a pending responsibility. Some countries, like the United States and Afghanistan, have not even ratified it, according to information found on the Internet.

The website of the Secretariat of the Convention provides basic information for understanding the issue, based on the notion that the biological diversity we observe today is the fruit of billions of years of evolution, shaped by natural processes and increasingly influenced by human beings.

The variety of nature is evident today in the fact that 1.75 million species have been classified. However, experts say there could be as many 13 million species, taking into account the flora and fauna that have not yet been identified. And some believe the number could reach 100 million.

Organizations like the All Species Foundation seek to identify all forms of life. It is a big challenge, considering that the current rate of classification is around 15,000 per year.

Biodiversity began to change radically 10,000 years ago, with the beginning of agriculture. And then began to accelerate three centuries ago, with humanity's era of industrialization. Species extinction, largely a natural process, sped up exponentially.

The World Conservation Union-IUCN, publishes a "Red Book", and the latest edition, from 2001, stresses that there currently are 11,046 species in danger of extinction.

At the international level, there are numerous initiatives aimed at fighting the deterioration of biodiversity, which is reflected in the many websites dedicated to the issue. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) sponsors a conservation monitoring project, World Conservation Monitoring Center and a trade convention on protected species, CITES. And then there is the World Resources Institute, which makes periodically evaluations about the situation of the Earth's living organisms.

But the road to travel in preserving biodiversity is still a long one. The variety of life forms must be taken into account, as well as the scale of organization of the species, including humans, from genes to ecosystems.

Convention on Biological Diversity
Secretariat on the Convention on Biological Diversity
IUCN: World Conservation Union - The Red Book
World Resources Institute
Portal: Virtual Library of Ecology and Biodiversity
UNEP: Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES)
UNEP: World Conservation Monitoring Center (WCMC)
All Species Foundation: seeks to inventory all species of life
Yahoo!: Directory on biodiversity

The Moon

The moon is often described as a natural satellite of Earth, as it is condemned to orbiting our planet. This link generates an important force, the effects of which are most evident in the changing tides of the oceans.

But in addition to influencing the level of the seas, an effect that has economic, social and environmental consequences, the moon has always fascinated humans, who since time immemorial have incorporated it into mythology, religion and study. After all, the moon is always there.

The moon has served, for example, to create calendars that have allowed humans to track time since the ancient era.

The moon is 384,000 km from the Earth and has a diameter of 3,476 km. It has a rough geography, spotted with craters caused by the impacts of meteorites. The largest, known as Newton, is 113 km across.

The origins of the moon remain a mystery, but there are several theories. One is that an impact of body from outer space with the Earth produced enough material to form the moon. In any case, it is believed to have occurred some four billion years ago.

Because the moon is smaller than the Earth, its gravitational pull has less effect on objects on its surface. A person would feel six times lighter, and a jump of one meter on Earth would be 5.5 meters on the moon.

That fact has been proved because the fascination with the moon prompted the world's major powers to create the technology to send humans to the moon. This occurred in 1969, but the last mission was in the 1970s, and since then there have been no more missions to that "natural satellite".

The Internet holds a great deal of information about the moon. There are those that explain its characteristics and unique qualities, those that explain its role in eclipses, and those that invite you to navigate cyber-space in search of greater knowledge.

NASA: Moon Page
Portal: Moonpeople, an introduction to the Moon
Apollo 11: Moon Landing, July 20, 1969
Lunar Calendar
Moon Facts: How much would you way on the moon?
Lunar Eclipses for Beginners

Financing for Development

The mobilization of resources to finance development is a pressing challenge for a world in which 1.2 billion people are condemned to extreme poverty. And it is also key to achieving environmental sustainability of the planet.

Government leaders and development activists from around the world gathered in March in the Mexican city of Monterrey to take part in the International Conference on Financing for Development, and will take up the matter again at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in late August.

The connection between the two conferences is important, because in Johannesburg the world community will review the commitments made at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At that time, the governments issued a document known as Agenda 21, in which they detailed the costs of sustainable development: 600 billion dollars a year.

One of the goals was that industrialized countries would provide some 125 billion dollars a year in development aid, the equivalent of 0.7 percent of their gross domestic products (GDP). They did not achieve that target, however, and in 2000 such assistance averaged 0.22 percent GDP.

A High-Level Panel on Financing for Development, organized by the UN to draft a report prior to the Monterrey summit, warned that if concrete targets are not achieved, the goals established in the Millennium Declaration will not be met, such as halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015.

Information available on the Internet exposes the challenges related to mobilizing resources for development, such as the willingness of poor countries to change their economic and financial policies to be more efficient.

One of the objectives for development must be to make the economic globalization process more equitable, say development activists and UN leaders.