IUCN - The World Conversation Union

“It is very difficult to explain to someone living in a big urban centre how his daily life decides on the survival of apes or coral reefs,” says Jean Christophe Vie, Deputy Head of the Species Programme at IUCN. “It is also difficult to explain why he should be concerned, and yet he should.”

The chain of cause and effect is long from the mall to the mines of the earth, where habitat destruction and sometimes bloodshed rage around the precious minerals that go into our cell phones. So isolated from the realities that lie behind the products we buy, it is too easy to hang on to the perfect world depicted on the packaging. But a message is starting to build inside the northern fortress of privilege: “This can’t go on,” – a message business is increasingly heeding.
“In today’s world the private sector is perhaps the largest actor, both in terms of having an impact on biodiversity and having the potential to support biodiversity conservation,” says Sue Mainka, Senior Programme Coordinator at the IUCN. “And yet we constantly push them aside and attack them, rather than trying to understand their constraints.”

Values are changing, and with them consumer behaviour. Perspicacious minds looking after long-term company interests have noticed that customers are worried; not yet panicked, but increasingly aware that unless they start making choices in favour of nature, no one else will. This is modifying attitudes among all institutions seeking public allegiance.

“I think people at large are now much more conscious of the role they can play in helping protect biodiversity by modifying their behaviours and also by putting pressure on their governments to take the necessary corrective actions to stem the destruction of biodiversity,” says Enrique Lahmann, the World Conservation Congress Manager for IUCN.

Biodiversity is not obscure, and neither is the importance of hanging on to it.

• Choose facts.