3GTW
the 3rd Global Taxonomy Workshop
Pretoria 2002
Paris 2003

Press Release
PRETORIA BIODIVERSITY WORKSHOP TO COMBAT CRISIS IN TAXONOMY
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Environmental scientists and managers, intergovernmental agencies, government representatives and NGOs from over 100 countries are to meet in Pretoria, South Africa, from 8-12 July 2002 for the 3rd Global Taxonomy Workshop (3GTW).

Taxonomy is the necessary, basic underpinning tool of all biodiversity management, but today is in crisis: levels of expertise, information and resources are critically low or non-existent, particularly where they are most needed, in the developing countries where most biodiversity still occurs. The Workshop aims to create new partnerships for building the taxonomic resources needed to address the mounting challenges of conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Taxonomy is the science and methodology needed to discover, identify, name and classify and to understand the relationships of all organisms on this planet. Every country needs access to taxonomic skills and resources to be able to recognise and know the organisms that constitute and threaten their biodiversity. All human life depends on the sustainable management of biodiversity; taxonomy is therefore key to supporting national programmes for sustainable agricultural development, and conservation and sustainable use of the environment. The economic impact of inadequate taxonomic skills and resources is enormous and typically affects the poorest countries most severely, as in the example of the Larger Grain Borer, a pest that arrived in Tanzania in a shipment of "aid" maize and subsequently led to crop losses of $88 million annually. Today, new taxonomic resources such as computerised identification tools and up to the minute information systems could prevent the spread of such pests. Such systems are urgently needed by the quarantine services of all countries to counter the spread of agricultural pests and other Invasive Alien Species, perhaps the greatest threat to the planet's biodiversity and food production.

The Pretoria Workshop is being organised by BioNET-INTERNATIONAL, the Global Network for Taxonomy, in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme and in association with the Secretariat of the International Plant Protection Convention. The event is being hosted by SAFRINET, the Southern African network of BioNET-INTERNATIONAL.

The Workshop aims to agree an action plan to implement the Programme of Work of the Global Taxonomy Initiative (GTI) agreed in April 2002 at the 6th Conference of the Parties of the CBD. The CBD has recognised the urgency of the crisis in taxonomy and described the lack of taxonomic capacity as the Taxonomic Impediment that is hindering implementation of the CBD in most countries. The scale and urgency of the crisis calls for prioritised, demand-driven strengthening of taxonomy to address as a priority the major environmental management issues the world faces today, a strategy reflected in the Workshop theme Towards Sustainable Development: Partnerships for Building Demand-driven Taxonomic Capacity.

Through this Workshop and its regionally owned and operated networks world-wide, BioNET-INTERNATIONAL aims to facilitate and promote the building of taxonomic capacity in partnership with the users and providers of taxonomic skills, information and products in the South and North.

The crisis in taxonomy was recognised in a recent report ("What on Earth? The threat to the science underpinning conservation") by the UK House of Lords select committee on science and technology. Baroness Joan Walmsley, Chair of the Select Committee, emphasised that taxonomy (or biosystematics) was central to the success of the Convention on Biological Diversity: "Unless we know what we have got, we can't preserve it". Yet funding for taxonomy is falling even in the UK, with funding for the major institutions involved in biodiversity research having fallen by about one-third in a decade in real terms, according to Baroness Walmsley. (Reuters News Service, 17 May 2002)

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