A brief online tour of Google Earth, or a flick through any atlas will quickly give you some vital information about Seychelles: the country is a long, long way from anywhere else. Hundreds of kilometres from our nearest island neighbours and the African mainland, the specks in the Indian Ocean that are Seychelles have been equally blessed and cursed by their remoteness.

The watery expanse between Seychelles and Africa has allowed unique ecosystems to develop on the islands, species unseen anywhere else in the world allowed to evolve in a relatively secure and secluded environment.

Diseases of wildlife are quite suddenly on everyone’s mind. Epidemics like SARS, Bird Flu, and others have brought forward to the world’s agenda the importance of studying diseases that could be passed from animals to humans.

Seychelles is often compared to other countries in terms of  national income measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or health statistics or trading volumes.. Now a survey, conducted by the New Economics Foundation and the environmental group Friends of the Earth, found that Seychelles is 30th in an innovative ranking of 178 countries.

This is what delegates were told at the opening of Conservation International’s Global Symposium held in Madagascar on Tuesday and which ends on Saturday. The title of the symposium is Defying Nature’s End: The African Context..