Alarm raised for Southeast Asia's endangered species

LOS BANOS, Laguna, Philippines – Time is running out on some of Southeast Asia’s prized wildlife, among them the Philippine Eagle.

Others endangered include Malaysia’s Sumatran rhinoceros, Brunei Darussalam’s Asian elephant, and the Eld’s deer of Laos.

Posing as grave threats to their continued existence are massive hunting, deforestation, human population growth, pollution, and climate change, among other causes.

“Out of 64,000 species found in the region, 1,312 are endangered,” reported the ASEAN Center for Biodiversity (ACB) based here.

Biodiversity, or biological diversity, has been defined as “the total richness of all the living forms and the processes of our planet. It is the web of life that includes all ecosystems, their component species, and the genetic variety of those species produced by nature.”

Although Southeast Asia occupies only three percent of the earth’s surface, it is home to 20 percent of all known species of plants and animals, noted the European Union (EU)-supported ACB, currently headed by Executive Director Rodrigo Fuentes.

This explain why many of the world’s best minds have been pooling their expertise in the Herculean task to avert the plunge of Southeast Asia’s biodiversity into the grim state of “irreversible descent.”

Not long ago, for instance, about 100 scientists from member-nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan, and Korea met at the UPLB-based Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization-Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEAMEO SEARCA) in what had been billed as the “ASEAN + 3 Regional Workshop on Global Taxonomy Initiatives (GTI): Needs Assessment and Networking”. Taxonomy is the science that deals with the description, naming, and classification of organisms.

SEARCA, headed by Director Gil C. Saguiguit Jr., is one of the 19 “centers of excellence” of SEAMEO, an intergovernment treaty body founded in 1965 to foster cooperation among Southeast Asian nations in the fields of education, science, and culture.

SEARCA, ACB, and ASEAN are among the regional initiatives hosted and supported by the Philippine government.

The workshop on biodiversity was supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and other Japanese government agencies, French entities (Museum of Natural History) Agricultural Research Center for International Development of CIRAD, French Research Institute for Development, European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, and Global Network for Taxonomy (Bionet).

“The mountains, jungles, lakes, rivers, and seas of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Lesto, and Vietnam form one of the biggest biodiversity pools in the world.” ACB stressed.

The region also has about 284,000 square kilometers (one-third) of the world’s coral reefs, which are among the most diverse in the world.

Seven of the world’s 25 recognized “biodiversity hotspots” are in the ASEAN region. Eighty percent of the region’s coral reefs are at risk.

Describing Southeast Asia’s importance to global biodiversity as “astonishing”, EU ambassador Alistair MacDonald noted: “A single small tropical forest patch in ASEAN, covering just a couple of hundred hectares, may support more endemic bird and mammal species than there are in the whole of Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium combined – and in Scotland, we only have one single endemic bird species.”

Dr. Fuentes also stressed: “The diminishing status of this science and profession (taxonomy) is crippling the capacity of the ASEAN member-states and other countries to effectively catalogue our biological resources. Without knowledge and understanding of species, it would be difficult to plan and implement biodiversity conservation efforts.”