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Despite signing the UN Biodiversity Convention at the Earth Summit in
Rio, and calling for its speedy implementation, Britain will not formally
ratify it before May next year, it emerged last week.

Kate Mayes, an official at the Department of the Environment, told a
meeting in Edinburgh last Friday that there would be no British signature
until outstanding ‘problems’ about the interpretation of the agreement were
clarified at the next meeting of the governing council of the UN Environment
Programme in May.

More than 50 nations must ratify the convention for it to come into
effect. The well-publicised signatures in Rio are not formally binding.
Ratification by national legislatures is the key step to implementation
of the convention, drawn up, in part by scientists, to protect the planet’s
threatened species and ecosystems.

Before the Earth Summit, Britain said it feared that the convention
amounted to a ‘blank cheque’ to provide money for developing nations to
protect their biodiversity. But the concern was widely thought to have been
resolved in Rio, when after much prevarication, Britain and its European
partners agreed to sign the convention at the end of the summit.

Announcing Britain’s decision to sign in Rio, environment secretary
Michael Howard said: ‘We are now satisfied that means can be found within
the convention to ensure that no country is obliged to contribute an open-ended
blank cheque to implement it.’ But now Britain appears to have retreated
to its pre-summit position. Mayes stressed outstanding ‘problems’ and said
that Britain’s ratification would ‘depend also on whether other European
Community countries ratify’.

The Edinburgh meeting of the Tropical Forest Forum – an informal gathering
of foresters, biologists and conservationists – also heard continuing alarm
among scientists at the government’s failure to put flesh on the Darwin
Initiative for deploying British expertise to protect biodiversity. The
initiative was unveiled by John Major in his address to the Earth Summit.

Mayes revealed that, almost three months after the summit, there was
still no money for the initiative. ‘We don’t yet know what we want to do,’
she explained. Mayes denied the claim of Labour MP Tam Dalyell that the
initiative was ‘dreamt up the night before the speech in Rio’.

A briefing note on the initiative provided to scientists attending the
forum last week was the same document handed out to journalists in Rio on
the day of the Prime Minister’s speech. The ‘small action team’ which, it
said, would ‘develop the framework for the initiative’ has not yet held
its first meeting, said Mayes. When it meets, it will ‘take decisions on
the structure of the initiative and what it will address’.

Mayes also revealed that no efforts have yet been made to discuss coordination
with other national or international efforts in the same field, such as
those by the European Science Foundation and the Commonwealth Science Council.

In July, the Royal Society issued a joint statement with the US National
Academy of Science calling for international cooperation among scientists
to draw up plans for maintaining biological diversity. ‘Initially we must
decide what we can offer in the UK,’ said Mayes.

The Darwin Initiative was condemned by several science administrators
at the forum as poorly thought out. George Holmes, chairman of the Edinburgh
Centre for Tropical Forests, said: ‘There is nothing new in this initiative.’
Martin Sands of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said it ‘seems a new name
for old actions’.

Jane Thornback, coordinator of the Tropical Forest Forum, condemned
Mayes’s stress on developing an ‘integrated strategy’. This, said Thornback,
‘is what civil servants retreat into when they don’t know what to do. In
Britain, we have centres of excellence with good contacts round the world.
Rather than spending a lot of money preparing an integrated strategy, we
should channel money to the people who already know what to do with it.’

Progress to implement the Statement of Forest Principles, another key
conservation document from the Earth Summit, may be given to the administrators
of the UN’s Tropical Forestry Action Plan, which environmentalists claim
has been responsible for speeding up the rate of tropical deforestation.
The decision on who oversees the principles, the first international political
agreement on preserving forests, will probably be made at the UN General
Assembly in New York next month.