• Happy New Year, the UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.
• On Monday, a ban on red snapper fishing went into effect. Surprise, the fishermen are not happy. The decline is estimated to be about 97% in 60 years.
• The sea lions of Fisherman’s wharf, who showed up after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and whose disappearance was causing some consternation, have been found off Oregon, where there’s better fishing in an apparent El Niño year.
• SEED magazine interviews Paul Ehrlich. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single scientific review of something I’ve written that says, ‘this is wrong.’”
• Fantastic / superb essay on the great discrepancy between predicted and observed extinctions.
• How did Obama do environmentally? Good not great. From the Conservation Maven, reminding me once again how similar ‘conservation’ and ‘conservative’ look.

• Great roundup from ESABlawg on changes coming in environmental policy, including these amazing articles from the Oregonian and Seattle P.I. that the Bush administration’s shoddy governance has actually resulted in the timber industry and environmentalists to join forces against proposed rule changes. (“But the timber folks can see going in that, given what the Bush administration has done, the enviros would just waltz into court themselves and slap down the plan revisions the industry has worked so hard to procure.”) Delicious.
• South Africa is putting the finishing touches on the world’s first protected area specifically designed to mitigate impacts from climate change.
• Countries are kicking around the idea of creating a UN panel to address global biodiversity loss, in the mold of the IPCC. The way this article is written, it appears that the ecosystem services argument is convincing a lot of governments — hard to say if that’s just the perspective of the author or not. You know, this obviously deserves a much deeper dialogue, but if money is what ends up convincing the world’s governing bodies to engage with the current biodiversity CRISIS, maybe it really is worth it. It is slowly dawning on me how subtle arguments in favor of protecting biodiversity/natural habitat can be. You have to play to a person’s core values, and money has just never resonated with me the way it obviously does for so many people. If framing the debate in terms of financial opportunity raises the profile of conservation, so be it? Seems to be working for climate change. Of course, like most global capital enterprises, when climate change becomes a financial argument (as opposed to a moral one), it’s usually the poorest nations that suffer the negative consequences.
• The Big Picture strikes again, this time from Antarctica. BTW, Big Picture has a great feature that lets you navigate to each picture using the j/k keys to go forward and back. [enjoy your trip, Dad]

The UN has agreed to add biodiversity targets to its Millenium Development Goals, specifically reducing the proportion of species threatened with extinction using the IUCN Red List. Here’s a press release from BirdLife.

This is fantastic news. Getting buy-in from the UN will no doubt politicize the process of categorizing species on the Red List. But it should also improve it in a number of ways, by increasing transparency and strengthening guidelines. I’d love to see species weighted by genetic (or functional) uniqueness, but any index is better than none. This is a big step forward.