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Declaration calls for more wilderness protected areas to combat global warming Jeremy Hance mongabay.com November 11, 2009 Entitled the Merida Message, the declaration put forth by the Chairman and Executive Committee of WILD9, describes the humanity's current situation as such: "runaway carbon emissions are driving the climate towards irreversible tipping points; we are contaminating our planet with pervasive toxicity, destroying the diversity of life on our planet, exhausting freshwater supplies and causing acidification in our oceans, and over-exploiting our oceans, causing fisheries to collapse. As a result, we are deepening poverty, weakening social structures and threatening global security."
The Merida Message also calls for greater protection of the ocean's vegetated habitats, which store vast amounts of carbon. Recent research has found that these habitats—including mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grasses—account for at least 50 percent of all carbon storage in the ocean. The Merida Message will be making these recommendations at the Copenhagen United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December, where it will also call on the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) to integrate efforts to create solutions that mitigate climate change and stem biodiversity loss. "Wilderness protection on land and sea is key to both of these missions and the UNFCCC and CBD must work in a coordinated and urgent manner to facilitate protecting wilderness around the world," said WILD9 Chairman Exequiel Ezcurra.
WILD9 expects more signatories before the December meeting in Copenhagen where the declaration will be presented. The Merida message concludes that the crises facing the world today "is in stark contrast to the world we can have if wilderness and its contribution to natural life support systems are properly valued and protected. Wilderness sustains us, generating the essential services that make possible our economic and social prosperity, our physical health and our spiritual well-being. Our essential choice – indeed, the imperative – has never been clearer." Related articles Alleviating poverty and saving biodiversity are inherently linked argue scientists 
(09/17/2009) Twenty-nine scientists argue in Science today that the world will not be able to lift up the world's poor unless it also addresses global biodiversity loss. They say that the same underlying problems—exploitation of resources, unsustainable overconsumption, climate change, population growth—are exacerbating global poverty and the extinction of species.
Could agroforestry solve the biodiversity crisis and address poverty?, an interview with Shonil Bhagwat 
(09/24/2009) With the world facing a variety of crises: climate change, food shortages, extreme poverty, and biodiversity loss, researchers are looking at ways to address more than one issue at once by revolutionizing sectors of society. One of the ideas is a transformation of agricultural practices from intensive chemical-dependent crops to mixing agriculture and forest, while relying on organic methods. The latter is known as agroforestry or land sharing—balancing the crop yields with biodiversity. Shonil Bhagwat, Director of MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, believes this philosophy could help the world tackle some of its biggest problems.
Economists, scientists warn that world crises require new order of international cooperation and enforcement (09/15/2009) A group of environmental scientists and economists warn that under current governing models the number and scale of human-caused crises are "outrunning our ability to deal with them".
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