UNITED NATIONS -- Governments are largely ignoring a biodiversity protection treaty they signed 17 years ago, allowing the rate of species decline to continue at an alarming rate, the United Nations said in a report released today.

"The abundance of vertebrate species, based on assessed populations, fell by nearly a third on average between 1970 and 2006 and continues to fall globally," says the report, issued ahead of a top-level meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development this week in New York.

"The five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity."

The report does see progress in the creation of preserves, in particular in the number of protected marine areas announced in recent months, but the overall assessment of the treaty by its Montreal-based secretariat paints a grim picture, saying habitat losses have offset gains. Wetlands, salt marshes and habitats for shellfish seem to be suffering the most damage.

Nutrients washing off farmland are turning waterways into biological "dead zones," the report says, and ocean acidification and stormwater runoff have made coral reefs "vulnerable to collapse."

The report also sounds the alarm on overfishing, an area where government regulation has been particularly lax and which now threatens the impending collapse of important commercial fish stocks.

"This is a time of reckoning for decision makers committed to the global effort to safeguard the variety life on Earth and its contribution to human well-being," Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive director of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) office, writes in a preface to the report. "No country has reported that it will completely meet the 2010 target, and a few Parties have unequivocally stated they will not meet it."

Djoghlaf's office concludes that the failure of states to meet the terms and objectives of the biodiversity convention stems from the fact that environment ministries and agencies are too weak or are easily overruled by bureaucracies and politicians devoted to advancing commercial interests instead.

"The CBD has very nearly universal participation from the world's governments," the report notes, "yet those involved in its implementation rarely have the influence to promote action at the level required to effect real change." The only way to resolve this, the authors conclude, is to have a national government as a whole adopt the general premise that biodiversity preservation is a prerequisite to economic self-preservation.

The 10th Conference of Parties to the CBD will be held in October in Nagoya, Japan. Member states are expected to adopt new biodiversity protection targets, this time for 2020 and 2050, while debating why goals set in 2002 were missed and what to do about it.

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