A Global Index of Biocultural Diversity Discussion Paper for the International Congress on Ethnobiology University of Kent, U.K., June 2004 David Harmon and Jonathan Loh DRAFT DISCUSSION PAPER: DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE The purpose of this paper is to draw comments from as wide a range of reviewers as possible. Terralingua welcomes your critiques, leads for additional sources of information, and other suggestions for improvements. Address for comments: David Harmon c/o The George Wright Society P.O. Box 65 Hancock, Michigan 49930-0065 USA
[email protected] or Jonathan Loh
[email protected] CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4 BACKGROUND 6 Conservation in concert 6 What is biocultural diversity? 6 The Index of Biocultural Diversity: overview 6 Purpose of the IBCD 8 Limitations of the IBCD 8 Indicators of BCD 9 Scoring and weighting of indicators 10 Measuring diversity: some technical and theoretical considerations 11 METHODS 13 Overview 13 Cultural diversity indicators 14 Biological diversity indicators 16 Calculating the IBCD components 16 RESULTS 22 DISCUSSION 25 Differences among the three index components 25 The world’s “core regions” of BCD 29 Deepening the analysis: trend data 29 Deepening the analysis: endemism 32 CONCLUSION 33 Uses of the IBCD 33 Acknowledgments 33 APPENDIX: MEASURING CULTURAL DIVERSITY—GREENBERG’S 35 INDICES AND ELFs REFERENCES 42 2 LIST OF TABLES Table 1. IBCD-RICH, a biocultural diversity richness index. 46 Table 2. IBCD-AREA, an areal biocultural diversity index. 51 Table 3. IBCD-POP, a per capita biocultural diversity index. 56 Table 4. Highest 15 countries in IBCD-RICH and its component 61 indicators.