The Independent covers the latest volley in the spat between conservationists and humanists over just how racist the war on invasives/non-natives/exotics/illegals/three-fifths is. The defensive cry of “Don’t call me Goebbels” hits just the right hysterical note, if you ask me. I do wonder what the ecological equivalent of the Obama election would be…

• Curious about where current theory stands on the origin of the uneven distribution of biodiversity? Here’s some pop science from Seed for you.
• Is the Fish & Wildlife Service discouraging public comments*? ESA Blawg is on the case!
• There are about 30 Amur Leopards left in the world. Somebody got a photograph of one of them with a kill.
• IUCN has released a report (pdf) during the WCC this week that suggests that, out of 17,000 species analyzed, about 7,000 are at risk of extinction from climate change. The report is nice to read, and nice to look at it. It does not appear to address the fact that all the species on earth today have, through their ancestors, survived billions of years of climate change: that is, there’s no room for adaptation/evolution. I’m not, by any means, optimistic about the future of our planet’s biodiversity, but the idea that none of these species will be able to adapt to new environmental conditions is nonsense. We don’t know enough to say how, or which ones, will do so, but it’s just not presented in this report. To paraphrase one noted ecologist at my fair university, “Our ability to predict where and how extinctions will occur is very soon going to be surpassed by our ability to observe them.”
• Government officials in Sumatra have agreed to try to protect its forests. Yeah, those forests, the ones that under current deforestation rates (and subsequent peat burning) are contributing the equivalent of about 50% of Australia’s carbon emissions.

*(Yes)

The UN has agreed to add biodiversity targets to its Millenium Development Goals, specifically reducing the proportion of species threatened with extinction using the IUCN Red List. Here’s a press release from BirdLife.

This is fantastic news. Getting buy-in from the UN will no doubt politicize the process of categorizing species on the Red List. But it should also improve it in a number of ways, by increasing transparency and strengthening guidelines. I’d love to see species weighted by genetic (or functional) uniqueness, but any index is better than none. This is a big step forward.