Biodiversity Summit
What does SIL International have to do with Biodiversity?
Well, much more than you might think. I'll mention two things.
First, many small local languages are threatened with extinction by larger national and international languages, and something similar is happening with biodiversity. Many fragile, local species are threatened in their survival by stronger and more common species.
Second, SIL works a lot in areas where language diversity is high and this roughly overlaps with the areas of the world where biodiversity is also high.
So it is no wonder that many of the language groups SIL is involved with face the same challenges that threaten biodiversity: changing land use, invasive species, changing ecology, droughts, erosion, climate change, etc.
Areas in the world with high biodiversity
Areas in the world with high language diversity
SIL is fully committed to the well-being of the language groups it's serving and to supporting them with the challenges that they face. That is why SIL delegated us, Daniel Flenley and me, to the UN Biodiversity Summit. This conference is held every two years and this year it was in Colombia.
During this conference we got to know this international environment much better and made many different contacts with governments, organizations and sponsors. There were organizations with materials and services useful to the language groups that SIL serves. And there were several governments and organizations interested in our expertise as a linguistic organization with years of experience working with small language groups. Many governments and environmental organizations work with these kinds of language groups where good communication is critical. It was a very busy but also fruitful time for us.
If you would like to get an impression of the summit, you can read the blogs I wrote for A Rocha Netherlands (here and here) and the interviews in two Dutch Christian newspapers: Nederlands Dagblad and Reformatorisch Dagblad.
