Our Daily Planet

January 29, 2021
In an open letter, 450 elected officials from all around the U.S. support President Biden’s Executive Order action this week to protect 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. The officials hope that the president will lead a swift and aggressive campaign to combat global warming and the extinction crisis through conserving land and ocean spaces for the benefit of nature. Biden has also pledged to reverse a number of the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, many of which reduced protections for key public lands and infringed on Indigenous sovereignty.

Why This Matters: As this letter makes clear, parks and access to nature are important to Americans across the country – in red and blue states.  During his time in office, Trump rolled back protections for countless public lands, including areas like Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments in Utah, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The rollbacks, meant to clear the way for development, largely failed to attract buyers in Alaska, but fossil fuel companies bought up enough land in the Western U.S. at the end of the Trump administration to continue oil drilling for years.

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Treehugger

January 28, 2021
Earth’s biodiversity is in trouble. A landmark 2019 assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.1 At the same time, human actions have dramatically transformed 75 percent of the Earth’s surface and 66 percent of its ocean ecosystems.

To solve this problem, a group of more than 50 countries have come together under the banner of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People and pledged to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. The initiative is being referred to in the media as HAC 30x30.

“Our future depends on preventing the collapse of the natural systems that provide our food, clean water, clean air and stable climate,” Rita El Zaghloul, HAC coordinator at the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica, told Treehugger in an email. “In order to preserve these crucial services for our sustainable economies, we must protect enough of the natural world to sustain them.”

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Vox

January 27, 2021
Biden took the next leap in pursuing his climate agenda Wednesday, signing the latest in a spate of environment-focused executive orders. One of the most ambitious goals buried in the order he put forward is to conserve nearly a third of US land and ocean waters by 2030.

Currently, only 12 percent of the country’s land and 26 percent of its oceans are protected, according to a 2018 report by the Center for American Progress. This was achieved by slowly expanding protected areas over the past few decades — until former President Trump took office. In his first year, his administration dramatically shrank two Utah monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — the largest removal of federal land from protection in US history, according to the New York Times. Now the Biden administration will have to quickly reverse course to meet the new goal.

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National Geographic

January 27, 2021
In an executive order issued on January 27 to address the climate crisis, President Joe Biden ordered a pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands and created a White House office of environmental justice. He also quietly committed his administration to an ambitious conservation goal—to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and coastal seas by 2030.

That target, referred to as “30 by 30” by the conservation community, is backed by scientists who argue that reaching it is critical both to fighting climate change and to protecting the estimated one million species at risk of going extinct.

The U.S. is currently conserving around 26 percent of its coastal waters but only about 12 percent of its land in a largely natural state, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

To reach the 30 by 30 target will require conserving an additional area twice the size of Texas, more than 440 million acres, within the next 10 years. The White House has yet to specify who will oversee the initiative at the federal level and which lands and waterways might be prioritized

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Campaign for Nature

January 27, 2021
Today's announcement by President Biden is a win for the people of the United States and the rest of the world, the environment, and the economy. Only by protecting the earth's climate and biodiversity can we truly be on a path to an inclusive and prosperous future for humanity.

 By promising to set the United States on a path to conserve 30% of the U.S by 2030 (30x30) – on land and at sea – President Biden has proposed the most ambitious conservation agenda of any president in American history. Such vision addresses the scale of the challenges facing our climate and the natural world. Only by rapidly accelerating the pace of conservation will we stand a chance to slow the warming of our planet and prevent a climate catastrophe, and to reverse the loss of biodiversity, which many experts have warned is the beginning of a Sixth Mass Extinction and the collapse of humanity’s life support system. 

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The Guardian

January 18, 2021
A coalition of NGOs is calling for an urgent ban on destructive bottom trawling in EU marine protected areas, after the failure of member states to defend seas.

The ban is part of a 10-point action plan to “raise the bar” to achieve biodiversity targets, which they say will not be met by current promises, such as last year’s high-profile pledge by world leaders at the UN summit on biodiversity in New York to reverse nature loss by 2030. 

A raft of EU laws to safeguard marine life – including a duty on EU member states to achieve “good environmental status” in seas by 2020, to achieve healthy ecosystems and to introduce sustainable fisheries management – have not been enforced, says the group, which includes Oceana in Europe, Greenpeace and ClientEarth.

They warn that this failure, combined with existing pressures on Europe’s seas, including climate change, risks triggering irreversible changes to the ecological conditions under which humanity has evolved and thrived.

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China Daily

January 18, 2021
Analysts said the commitment by China and some 50 other countries to protect 30 percent of the earth's land and oceans by 2030 was a much-needed step to halt biodiversity loss and prevent species extinction.

Realizing the mission, though, will not be easy as the new goal would mean a huge scale-up in protected land and ocean area compared to current levels.

The new commitment by 50-odd countries is "very positive and very much needed to address the linked global crisis we are facing on climate change and biodiversity loss", said Bruce Dunn, director of environment and safeguards at the Manila based Asian Development Bank's sustainable development and climate change department.

"Realizing this ambition will be challenging, however, because it means doubling the existing land area protected, and more than tripling the area of protected oceans," Dunn said.

"Protection also implies sustainable management and sustainable financing, which has been a big challenge with the existing estate of protected areas."

China was among a group of more than 50 countries that pledged to protect the planet's land and sea area by 2030 as part of efforts to stop plants and animals from becoming extinct and address climate change issues.

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Republic of the Philippines

January 13, 2021
The ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has expressed openness to the outcomes of the One Planet Summit, hosted by the French government, United Nations, and World Bank, on 11 January 2021.

“We welcome fresh commitments from world leaders, which the ACB views with much optimism and enthusiasm. These pledges pivot initiatives to conserve and restore ecosystems in the ASEAN region and across the globe, especially now that we are ushering in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration,” ACB Executive Director Theresa Mundita Lim said.

At the summit, governments, such as the United Kingdom (UK) and France, announced earmarking funds for nature-based solutions.  UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK will commit at least GBP 3 billion (USD 4 billion) to climate change solutions that protect and restore nature and biodiversity over five years. The summit also saw USD 10 billion earmarked for the Great Green Wall, a project to restore degraded lands in the Sahel along an 8,000-kilometre band from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, along with new financial commitments from Norway and Germany.

Some 50 nations expressed support for the plan to carve out 30 per cent of global lands and oceans for protection by 2030 (30x30 goals).

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Xinhua

January 12, 2021
World leaders on Monday reiterated the urgent need for concerted global action to safeguard biodiversity and for a global governance framework on climate issues in the post-pandemic era.

"We have been poisoning air, land and water -- and filling oceans with plastics," United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, while addressing world leaders at the One Planet Summit for biodiversity.

Organized by the French government in partnership with the UN and the World Bank, the One Planet Summit brought together world leaders to commit action to protect and restore biodiversity. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the event was largely virtual.

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Independent

January 12, 2021
A group of 50 countries has pledged to protect at least 30 per cent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030 in a bid to tackle the world’s worsening biodiversity crisis.

The commitment to restoring nature was announced on Monday at the One Planet Summit, a key meeting for world leaders hosted by France, the World Bank and the UN.

The coalition of countries, led by the UK, Costa Rica and France, together account for around 28 per cent of the world’s land animals and a quarter of the land’s carbon reserves.

The group aims to galvanise greater action on stemming biodiversity loss ahead of a key UN biodiversity summit, which is to be held in Kunming, China later this year in May.  

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PEW

January 12, 2021
In 2021, the parties to the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are expected to adopt a new 10-year global biodiversity framework with goals and targets for ocean protection.

In support of a growing call to protect and conserve 30% of the ocean by 2030, on Jan. 12 an informal coalition of nongovernmental and other civil society organizations shared with representatives from CBD a statement calling for a robust global biodiversity framework that will safeguard our ocean ecosystems for the long-term benefit of communities, fishers, biodiversity, and Earth’s climate.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation

January 11, 2021

A global coalition to protect at least 30% of the planet's land and ocean by 2030 has swelled its ranks to about 50 countries, as governments said at a summit hosted by France Monday that biodiversity loss and climate change should be tackled jointly.

First launched in 2020, the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People added more than 20 nations, including Japan, Germany, Kenya, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Ecuador.

Its member countries combined are home to an estimated 30% of animal and plant species on land and a quarter of carbon stores in biomass and soil, the coalition said.

Their boundaries also contain 28% of ocean areas that are most important to preserve global marine biodiversity, and more than a third of carbon stocks in the Earth's seas.

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La Nación

January 11, 2021
Este lunes 11 de enero de 2021 será el lanzamiento de la Coalición de Alta Ambición para la Naturaleza y las Personas (HAC, por sus siglas en inglés), iniciativa que busca proteger, como mínimo, 30% de las superficies terrestre y marina del planeta de aquí al 2030.

Se trata de una iniciativa enfocada en el secuestro de carbono, para salvar especies amenazadas, la cual es liderada por Costa Rica y Francia, con el Reino Unido como aliado en temas marítimos.

El proyecto será presentado en el marco de la cuarta edición de la cumbre One Planet Summit, organizada por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas (ONU), Francia y el Banco Mundial.

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France 24

January 11, 2021
There is a growing coalition of nations calling on countries to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030 under the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, with Costa Rica leading the charge. Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada tells FRANCE 24 that losing ecosystems and biodiversity creates problems for humanity.

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Der Spiegel

January 11, 2021
Auf dem Klima- und Artenschutzgipfel »One Planet Summit« beraten Staats- und Regierungschefs aus aller Welt über verstärkte Bemühungen zur Rettung der Umwelt. Den ersten Schritt macht dabei Frankreich. Gastgeber Präsident Emmanuel Macron warb bei dem virtuellen Treffen am Montag in Paris für ein Projekt in Afrika, das mit Milliarden-Investitionen gefördert werden soll: die große Grüne Mauer.

Dafür sollen Tausende Kilometer Bäume wie ein grünes Band in der Sahelzone gepflanzt werden – von Dakar bis Dschibuti. Dies soll die Ausbreitung der Sahara und somit die Wüstenbildung stoppen und die Region auch vor Hungersnöten und Dürre schützen. Das Projekt ist seit vielen Jahren geplant, kam bisher jedoch nur langsam voran. Die Sahelzone in Afrika ist besonders vom Klimawandel betroffen.

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