UNDP Award Ceremony at Museum Kicks Off MDG Summit

Monday, September 27 3:17 pm

On Monday, September 20, the American Museum of Natural History hosted a gala event in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United States Agency for International Development, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Conservation Society, Conservation International, the World Resources Institute, and other organizations, where 25 local and indigenous community groups from across the developing world were presented with the Equator Prize.

The award ceremony, together with a policy forum was convened to illuminate critical linkages between biodiversity conservation, healthy ecosystems, climate change and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Celebrities and opinion leaders joined top UN dignitaries to help deliver the message to leaders that biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, which are being lost and degraded at unsustainable rates, are essential for achievement of the MDGs, and that front-line solutions advanced by local and indigenous communities offer tremendous opportunities for conservation and sustainable development and must be scaled up.

“The American Museum of Natural History is proud to collaborate with the U.N. Development Programme and to be a partner in the International Year of Biodiversity, which had its North American launch at the Museum in February,” said Ellen V. Futter, President of the Museum. “Through collective efforts like this one, we hope to foster a renewed commitment to and sustained public awareness of the urgency and enormous consequences of biodiversity loss, climate change, and related issues. Serving as a bridge between science and society, institutions like the Museum have an important role to play in advancing scientific understanding about our increasingly threatened natural world, bringing the fruits of that research to policymakers, and leaders, and, importantly, demystifying for the public the most vexing and complex science-based issues of our time.”

The event was attended by nine Heads of State or Government and dozens of Ministers in New York for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals. Ted Turner, Chairman of the United Nations Fund; Andrew Revkin, New York Times Dot Earth reporter; Edward Norton, actor and UN Goodwill Ambassador; Anggun, singer/songwriter and FAO Goodwill Ambassador and MDG Champion; Paul Tergat, marathoner and WFP Goodwill Ambassador; Catarina Furtado, television host/documentarian and UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador; Prince Albert II of Monaco; and Gisele Bündchen, supermodel and UNEP Goodwill Ambassador, were among the participants in the evening’s activities. Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator, gave the keynote speech.

For more information, see the UNDP’s press release.

Podcast: Children’s Health and Healthy Ecosystems

Thursday, May 13 1:48 pm

The American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Children’s Development Programme, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine on April 30, 2010 to discuss the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in relation to children’s health.

This panel discussion highlighted the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in meeting U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce child mortality and to promote child health and well being.

Panelists included Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Center for Health and Global Environment; Sigrid Hahn, associate director of Mount Sinai Global Health Center; Montira J. Pngsiri, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and Erika Vohman, director of The Equilibrium Fund.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hr 23 mins, 95.8 MB)

Podcast: International Year of Biodiversity at AMNH

Thursday, February 11 4:23 pm

More than 400 people traipsed through a blizzard to the American Museum of Natural History on February 10 for the North American launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. Ambassadors, Museum Trustees, and other invited guests gathered under the Museum’s famous blue whale which hangs in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. According to Olav Kjørven, assistant secretary-general and director of the Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP, the whale is a spectacular monument to Earth’s life and animals endangered by human activities.

The U.N. designated 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity to raise global awareness of the immense variety of life on Earth and to invite action to safeguard the essential networks on which all life, including humans, depends.

Celebrating the International Year of Biodiversity—and photographed in front of the Spectrum of Life at the American Museum of Natural History—are from left to right Paolo Galizzi (Fordham University School of Law), Marjorie Kaplan (Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc.), Veerle Vandeweerd (UNDP Environment and Energy Group), Ahmed Djoghlaf (Convention on Biological Diversity), Olav Kjørven (UNDP Director of the Bureau for Development Policy), Tran Triet (Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project), Eleanor Sterling (AMNH’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation), Theodore Roosevelt IV (AMNH Board of Trustees), and Carter Ingram (Wildlife Conservation Society). Photo Credit: AMNH/R. Mickens

“We need to refocus the world on biodiversity—the complex tapestry of interconnections at every level that supports life on Earth,” said Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Museum. “We’ve lost sight of the biodiversity crisis because of other global challenges like climate change. But now we need to step back, understand the causes and consequences of our continued impact on life on the planet, and develop realistic and comprehensive strategies that allow dynamic human communities, economies, and life to thrive.”

The partners for this event, which include Conservation International, Fordham University, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Foundation, and Wildlife Conservation Society, agree that stronger commitments need to be secured for biodiversity and the vital ecosystems that sustain life.

The evening opened with comments by Michael Novacek, provost of Science at the Museum, who introduced Mr. Kjørven and Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. A special preview of the premier world television event LIFE, a co-production of BBC and Discovery Channel, was introduced by Marjorie Kaplan, the president and general manager of Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc. A panel discussion including Charles McNeill, UNDP senior policy advisor, Veerle Vandeweerd, UNDP director of the Environment and Energy Group, Tran Triet, representative of the Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project, Paolo Galizzi, Fordham University School of Law, Morten Wetland, Norway’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., and Dr. Sterling followed.

This podcast is the North American launch of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, a designated by the United Nations.  The program, Biodiversity is Life, Biodiversity is Our Life, took place at the Museum on February 10, 2010.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hour 3 mins, 58 MB)

Celebrating Biodiversity, Parasite by Parasite

Thursday, January 21 11:00 am

Parasites highlighted on the new blog include Hymenolepis microstoma, Wolbachia pipientis, and Sacculina carcini. Credit: Pete Olson, USCS and Hans Hillewaert.

For the next 365 days, Museum Curator Susan Perkins is going to wiggle through thousands of species, burrow through relationship networks, and siphon off the relevant and interesting facts for her new blog, Parasite of the Day. Perkins will post a daily profile of a parasite that she unearths as part of a celebration of the United Nation’s International Year of Biodiversity.

Parasites are those species that we blast with an arsenal of chemicals, pinch to remove from our pets and plants, and, well, generally try to shake off. But parasites have amazing evolutionary histories and biological adaptations, and Perkins, who studies malaria and other pathogens, is the perfect person to tout them.

Check out her blog each day to see what stories she finds. Recent posts include tapeworms that inhabit rodents via flour beetles, an insect-infecting bacterium that is a distant relative of Salmonella and sometimes feminizes males, barnacles that get crabs to care for them as if eggs, and Trypanosoma brucei, the single-celled organisms that use rapid costume changes to fool immune systems and cause the disease sleeping sickness.