C o n c l u s i o n

	"Vecchioemare" Photo by Anna Maffi

Uses of the IBCD
Why should anyone try to put numbers on biocultural diversity in the first place? We certainly do not claim that an index such as the IBCD captures the richness of the world’s biocultural fabric—the lived-in depth of feeling that traditional indigenous communities express through their cultural practices, or the sense of place that many non-indigenous people feel toward where they live, to give two examples. Rather, the value of an IBCD and similar measures is largely practical and political. Pinpointing the world’s areas richest in biocultural diversity helps raise the awareness of the general public (and opinion-leading organizations such as the news media) about what is at stake. That can help lead to changes in personal attitudes toward cultures and places not their own, with the effect (one hopes) of engendering more understanding and respect among people everywhere. That, in turn, should lead to more enlightened public policy.

In any national-level ranking system there is a risk that some people may be tempted to write off lower-ranked countries as being “less valuable” in terms of the characteristic(s) at issue. As far as the IBCD goes, this would be a fundamental mistake: every country’s biocultural diversity, no matter where it ranks, is an important part of the global whole, and the global whole is inherently worth preserving. Having said that, however, the IBCD could be used to help prioritize strategic investments in biocultural diversity conservation. The three “core regions” identified above are in that sense analogous to several well-known schemes for identifying the world’s most important area for species conservation that have been developed over the last decade, including biodiversity hotspots, a globally representative network of ecoregions, endemic bird areas, and centers of plant diversity .

The IBCD could also be adapted to play an important role in fulfilling the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD has set ambitious targets, to be met by 2010, for significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss worldwide. In February 2004, the CBD’s seventh Conference of the Parties (COP7) proposed a suite of quantitative indicators to be used in measuring progress toward hitting the 2010 target. One of the goals of the CBD is to “maintain [the] socio-cultural diversity of indigenous and local communities” (CBD 2004:12). In line with this, COP7 specifically recognized the “status of traditional knowledge, innovations and practices” as one of its focal areas, and identified the “status and trends of linguistic diversity and numbers of speakers of indigenous languages” as a possible indicator (CBD 2004:8). The IBCD could be expanded to include time-series data on linguistic diversity in order to help make this indicator a reality. It also may be possible to incorporate into the IBCD other measures of change in the intergenerational transmission of traditional environmental knowledge.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this work was underwritten by the Ford Foundation, andthe current revision was supported by The Christensen Fund. All of the work has been done under the auspices of Terralingua, and we thank the staff and board of directors for their support. We are grateful to several reviewers who commented on the earlier version, and to Emile C. C. Yeoh for permission to cite (in the Appendix) his working paper on ethnic fractionalization.

top

next >>