Special Issue

Nature Conservation 2009 — 1. 9. 2009 — Special Issue

Editorial

author: Ladislav Miko

Dear readers,

At present, actual and expected climate change has been no doubt one of the most debated global problems, may be also because we can contemporarily observe its impacts in various forms immediately around us.

On the contrary, loss of biological diversity has been often considered as an issue which does not apply to us so much and which has been in progress rather in Amazonian rainforests or on Pacific coral reefs. Moreover, although less obviously, the biodiversity loss has been here and now.

Not only in the Czech Republic, we have used to examine both the exceedingly serious problems separately. Nevertheless, they are closely related, even more, they are two sides of the same coin. A decade ago, respected conservation biology textbooks stated that no single species had become extinct on the Earth due to climate change. Currently, the statement has not been correct yet. Climate changes have not been the main driver causing species extinction and large-size natural habitat degradation and destruction and reducing the capacity of ecosystems to provide humans with services on which we depend with our lives. Nonetheless, projections based on the best-science available show that the fact would be dramatically changed even in the near future. On the other hand, nature conservation and landscape protection can substantially contribute not only to mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sinks, but also to adapting the human society to the above process by reducing the vulnerability of natural and human systems to the changes. Ecosystem services are often the cheapest way how to adapt to climate change effects: let us mention mitigation of floods, capture and storage of carbon outside the atmosphere and a lot of other issues we are not able to cope with without nature.

It is the relationship between climate change and biological diversity the special issue of our journal deals with. We have tried to provide readers not only with a brief review on our current knowledge of various aspects within the topic, but also to present possible solutions, aiming at the Czech Republic.

It is not by chance that climate protection as well biodiversity conservation and management have been included among the priorities during the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The year 2009 has been characterised by heavy negotiations on setting up principles of new global climate protection policy beyond 2012 when the well-known Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will expire. The internatio­nal community shall also clearly define the priorities in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity beyond 2010. Therefore, I would like within the Government to initiate drafting the still missing conceptual document – a National Climate Change Adap­tation Strategy.

I am sure that we will not in time and successfully solve the climate change problem without preventing the continuing loss of biodiversity and that succesful biodiversity and ecosystem conservation is impossible without effective solving the climate change problem.

Ladislav Miko

Minister of the Environment of the Czech Republic