Changing climate struck biodiversity in Asia and the Pacific: An overview

Abstract

Two over-riding trends characterize the beginning of the third millennium. First, the global human ecosystem diversity is threatend by grave imbalances in productivity and in the distribution of goods and service. The unsustainable progression of extremes of wealth and poverty threatens the stability of the whole human system, and with it the global environment. Secondly, the world is undergoing accelerating change, with internationally-coordinate environmental stewardship lagging behind economic and social development. While each part of the Earth's surface is endowed with its own combination of environmental attributes, each area must also contend with a unique, but interlinked, set of current and emerging problems. Forests, woodlands and grasslands are still being degraded or destroyed, marginal lands turned into deserts, and natural ecosystems reduced or fragmented, further threatening biodiversity (Dearden, P. 1996).