Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

John Major’s much publicised offer to protect the millions of species
that still survive on Earth has fallen far short of expectations. When the
Prime Minister announced his Darwin Initiative at the Rio Summit in June,
British biologists were jubilant. But this week, the government announced
the extent of its support for the scheme: £6 million over the next
three years.

Environment secretary Michael Howard said on Monday that the initiative,
which will pay British scientists to help safeguard biological diversity
in the developing world, would receive £1 million next year and £2
million and £3 million in succeeding years.

When Major returned from Rio, officials spoke of an annual budget of
up to £10 million. In July, Robin Pellew, director of the World Conservation
Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, a likely beneficiary of the scheme, said
that to be viable the initiative probably needed at least £5 million
a year. But the Treasury scotched such ambitions in the autumn spending
round.

Howard said this week, five months after Major’s announcement, that
there is still no agreement in Whitehall on how the initiative will be organised
or ‘the activities to be undertaken as part of it’. One problem is that
other government departments, including the Overseas Development Administration,
want a say in how the money is spent.

Ghillean Prance, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, welcomed
Howard’s announcement of funding, but indicated that private funding was
now likely to be more important than the public purse in his organisation’s
efforts to protect the planet’s biology. ‘Kew this last year has raised
over £2 million from private sources for projects on assessing biodiversity
in Brazil and Southeast Asia, and economic botany in general,’ he said