ABSTRACT
Alongwith global warming, the conservation of biodiversity was one of the twomajor issues at the June 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. It was called the ‘hottest’ environmental topic of 1993 (Mannion 1993) with a burgeoning academic and popular literature devoted to exploring its parameters. Valiverronen (1999: 404) characterises it as ‘the latest “big” environmental issue, comparable to acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change’. Yet twenty years before, the term biodiversity was unknown and it was not to be found in any compendium of threats to the environment. The skyrocketing career of biological diversity loss is a good illustration of how a ‘transnational epistemic community’ (see Chapter 7) can assemble, present and successfully contest a global environmental problem.
