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 species' habitats and life-support systems, identification of crucial localities featuring exceptional concentrations of species with exceptional levels of endemism that face exceptional degrees of threat, and special opportunities for linking species conservation with development aid.

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VII. SCOPE FOR NATIONAL ACTION
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64. As indicated earlier, governments need to follow a new approach in this field – one of anticipating the impact of their policies in numerous sectors and acting to prevent undesirable consequences. They should review programmes in areas such as agriculture, forestry, and settlements that serve to degrade and destroy species' habitats. Governments should determine how many more protected areas are needed, especially in the spirit of how such areas can contribute to national development objectives, and make further provision for protection of gene reservoirs (for instance, primitive cultivated varieties) that may not normally be preserved through conventional protected areas.

65. In addition, governments need to reinforce and expand existing strategies. Urgent needs include better wildlife and protected-area management, more protected areas of a non-conventional type (such as the ecological stations that are proving reasonably successful in Brazil), more game,cropping and ranching projects (such as the crocodile schemes in India, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Zimbabwe), more promotion of wildlife-based tourism, and stronger anti-poaching measures (even though relatively few species are threatened by poaching, compared with the vast numbers threatened by habitat loss). National Conservation Strategies, such as those already prepared in over 25 countries, can be important tools for coordinating conservation and development programmes.

66. Other measures governments could take to confront the crisis of disappearing species, recognizing that it constitutes a major resource and development challenge, include consideration of species conservation needs and opportunities in land use planning and the explicit incorporation of their genetic resource stocks into national accounting systems. This could entail establishing a natural-resource accounting system that directs particular attention to species as high-value yet little-appreciated resources. Finally. they should support and expand programmes of public education to ensure that the species question receives the attention it deserves throughout the entire population.

67. Every nation has only limited resources at its disposal for dealing with conservation priorities. The dilemma is how to use these resources most effectively. Cooperation with neighbouring nations sharing species and ecosystems can help streamline programmes as well as share expenses for regional initiatives. Explicit efforts to save particular species will be possible for only relatively few of the more spectacular or important ones. Agonizing as it will be to make such choices, planners need to /…