UNEP biodiversity information service launched

A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) initiative seeking to create Proteus, an electronic biodiversity information service worldwide, was launched in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Monday. "Proteus is intended to be an environmental database which provides easily accessible and reliable information about biodiversity, and the prospects for its implementation here are very good," Ali Tauqeer Shaikh, the chief executive of LEAD-Pakistan, the focal point for the global database in South Asia, told IRIN in Islamabad. The project, in the works for just over two years since it was first conceived, is intended to be an Internet-based information resource, providing simpler access globally to information about biodiversity than ever before. "This is a historic day, because time will tell that the outcome of the Proteus project will have an ever-lasting effect on all our efforts since [the 1992 World Earth Summit in] Rio to conserve biological diversity," Sheikh told a gathering at the launch, flanked by Shafqat Kakakhel, the UNEP deputy executive director, and Onder Yucer, the UN resident representative in Pakistan. World governments had agreed to a series of development objectives in the year 2000 known as the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs), Yucer told the assemblage, adding that, in order to achieve the MGDs, a concerted effort had to be made to reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2015. "How could we measure what we have lost, especially on indicators about which we have incomplete information?" he asked, as he underlined the urgent need to encourage the synthesis of already existing facts. "Proteus will aid us in making otherwise scattered data more readily available," Yucer added. "It's a huge project - huge," Shaikh said after the ceremony. "The database will eventually end up having approximately 3 billion entries," he explained, adding that Pakistan had been selected to be the first country where Proteus is to be implemented. "What is an even bigger honour for us is that LEAD-Pakistan has been selected to be the focal point for not just Pakistan, but all of South Asia, which includes countries such as India and Nepal as well," he said. Proteus also envisages harnessing young, motivated people to contribute to the biodiversity database. As part of its support for the project, LEAD-Pakistan - which is one of the 14 country/regional programmes run by LEAD International, the independent, non-profit-making organisation working to foster sustainable development on a larger scale, which was set up by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1991 - has already sought out two who have been deputed to work as research scholars. "There is no dearth of talented people in this country. We have already fielded two young men who are already at Cambridge," Shaikh said.