NAGOYA, Japan — Nokia, the telecommunications firm on which so many Jamaicans rely for their handsets, has joined forces with three other heavy weights in the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to launch the Save Our Species (SOS) initiative.

The initiative, launched on the sidelines of the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity yesterday, has as its theme “Save our species, save ourselves” and comes at a time when one in three amphibians and corals, one in three bird species and one in four mammals are facing extinction.

“It is important for us in the business community to be looking at what can we do to try to stop the rapid decline in biodiversity. (As businesses) we also rely on ecosystem services, on many scarce resources that have to be used for manufacturing our products and for how well people in different countries are doing,” said Kirsi Sormunen, Nokia’s vice-president for sustainability.

“Supporting biodiversity is important not only for the social and environmental (benefits), but also economic development. So we clearly see that the business community has a role in protecting and safeguarding biodiversity on the planet and we also believe that the best way to go about that is through a multi-stakeholder corporation, which is what we are talking here,” she added.

“The brand ‘save our species, save ourselves’, that is really what it is all about. What we also like about the initiative is that it is strategic, it is based on a global perspective but with local implementation and local plans, which is very much sort of how we work and how we do our plans. We hope to be able to attract many, many more of us,” Sormunen said.

So far, SOS has US$10 millio, thanks to Nokia, the GEF and the World Bank, and the plan is to have that sum swell to US$20 million over the next few years.

“We will hope that this coalition will be strong enough so that others will come and join us and we are looking for the private sector to engage directly, allowing biodiversity conservation to benefit from the financial resources and the ingenuity of business and corporations,” noted Monique Barbut, chief executive officer and chairman of the GEF.

“Our aim is to respond to priorities according to status in the wild and to cover all groups of species. We realise that some species are clearly more charismatic than others and many are central to the branding of companies, sports teams and even countries’ origins. Partners therefore will be able to target their investment to particular species of interest while supporting SOS other objectives which is preserving the diversity of all living organisms. SOS will give grants to civil society all around the world to implement conservation action all around the world, focusing on the specific resident species and their habitats,” she added.

At the same time, Barbut said there was little question in her mind as to the potential of the initiative.

“SOS is the most promising initiative yet to protect threatened species. Why? Because it combines the force of the largest public and private organisations working on biodiversity today. However, what truly makes SOS a sure bet is that our structure is designed to ensure synergy with existing conservation programmes that are being implemented by other leading organisations in the nature conservation field. There will be no duplication of efforts and we all are now calling on you to join us very quickly,” said the GEF boss.

Already a few grants have been selected under the initiative, covering more than 30 species. They include recovering populations of the Critically Endangered Saiga antelope following the death of nearly 12,000 of their number in western Kazakhstan last May and the Critically Endangered Chinese Giant Salamander. And courtesy of SOS funding, a new amphibian species, belonging to a highly threatened group, was discovered recently in Colombia — the Choco harlequin toad.

Meanwhile, the IUCN will manage the initiative — which will have its secretariat based in Switzerland — by using the findings of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and the expertise of its thousands of experts globally.