The Guardian

January 28, 2020
Ecosystems will continue to collapse around the world unless humanity listens to the expertise of indigenous communities on how to live alongside nature, a prominent Amazon leader has warned.

Tuntiak Katan of the Ecuadorian Shuar people, who is vice-president of the pan-Amazon organisation representing communities in the river basin, said governments were spending millions of dollars on environmental consultants while largely ignoring the land management skills of the planet’s indigenous people that could help combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

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Phys.org

January 27, 2020
A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows.

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The Times of India - Editorial

January 25, 2020
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatan Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called The Sixth Extinction, the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed by human activities.

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National Geographic

January 24, 2020
Business as usual isn’t working for the planet. Human-driven activities, such as deforestation and overfishing, have put one million species at risk of extinction, according to a ground-breaking 2019 United Nations report. The report is a thunderous wake-up call for the world on the need to make protecting nature job No. 1.

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Eco-Business

January 24, 2020
Cosmetics firms can look at reducing palm oil use, while wineries can cut chemicals to help animal pollinators. Companies should examine ways to make production chains more friendly to biodiversity, said eminent scientist Sandra Diaz.

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ZAWYA

January 21, 2020
Sharjah, UAE: Organised by Sharjah’s Environment and Protected Areas Authority (EPAA), the 21st Sharjah International Conservation Forum for Arabian Biodiversity (SICFAB), which begins on February 3rd, will address several important topics over a period of four days at the Desert Park. SICFAB will include an introduction to marine and coastal management covering coral, turtles, sharks, marine mammals, mangroves and seaweed.

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Business Wire

January 21, 2020
In an encouraging move with the potential to create transformative market change, China recently amended its Forest Law to include a nationwide ban on buying, transporting, and/or processing illegally sourced timber, as well as an added focus on traceability.

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Yahoo Finance

January 20, 2020
Business leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week are supporting a new science-based approach to tackling their companies' impacts on both climate change and all the Earth's natural systems.

The fight against climate change cannot be won without both decarbonizing our economies and restoring balance to the "global commons": land, oceans, freshwater and biodiversity, alongside climate.

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EcoWatch

January 20, 2020
Talk is cheap, says the acting executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, who begged governments around the world to make sure that 2020 is not another year of conferences and empty promises, but instead is the year to take decisive action to stop the mass extinction of wildlife and the destruction of habitat-sustaining ecosystems, as The Guardian reported.

Acting Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema warned that the absence of concrete action to stop deforestation, pollution and the climate crisis will mean that humanity has given up on the planet.

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World Economic Forum

January 19, 2020
Businesses are more dependent on nature and biodiversity than expected, according to The New Nature Economy Report, released today.

Analysis of 163 industry sectors and their supply chains found that over half of the world’s GDP –$44 trillion of economic value generation – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and, as a result, exposed to risks from nature loss.

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Yahoo Finance

January 19, 2020
L'OCCITANE Group today announced the creation of a fund to support ecosystems that are severely affected by natural disasters, such as the devastating fires in the Amazon and Australia. Determined to protect biodiversity for future generations, the L'OCCITANE Ecosystem Restoration Fund aims to respond to climate emergencies on an ad hoc basis. The fund will be financed by a voluntary internal donation campaign among L'OCCITANE's shareholders.

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Live Science

January 17, 2020
Five years ago, tens of thousands of emaciated seabirds washed ashore on the Pacific Coast. Now, scientists know why: a long-lived marine heat wave known as "the blob."

The common murre (Uria aalge) is a black and white seabird that reaches about 1 foot (0.3 meters) long and can dive hundreds of meters deep into water in search of prey. These seabirds feast on tiny "forage fish" such as sardines, herring and anchovies, and need to consume about half of their body weight every day in order to survive.

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European Parliament News

January 16, 2020
MEPs want the upcoming global biodiversity conference COP 15 to agree on legally binding targets, as was the case for the Paris agreement on climate change. Parliament adopted its position in view of the 2020 UN biodiversity conference (COP 15), in Kunming (China) in October by show of hands. To stop the current trajectory of biodiversity loss, the conference needs to agree on legally binding targets with timelines, performance indicators and reporting mechanisms based on common standards, says the resolution.

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Campaign For Nature

January 15, 2020
Today, the World Economic Forum released a new report outlining the findings of its annual Global Risks Perception Survey. Environmental concerns dominate the top long-term risks identified by survey participants, with “major biodiversity loss” named the second-most-impactful and third-most-likely risk for the next decade. The report notes its potential “irreversible consequences for the environment, resulting in severely depleted resources for humankind as well as industries.”

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The Hill

January 14, 2020
In Portugal’s Greater Côa Valley, a transformation is underway. Once degraded and overgrown, thousands of hectares of this remote ecosystem are being restored and rewilded. Plans are afoot to reintroduce wild horses, roe deer and Iberian ibex. This restoration will improve the connection between the Malcata mountain range and the Douro Valley. It is an all-round win for Portuguese wildlife.

But if this grand vision is to be sustainable, it needs to be profitable. The valley has suffered one of the highest rates of land abandonment in Europe, which has contributed to the decline of the landscape — the area became overgrown in the absence of grazing farm animals, and that in turn has harmed biodiversity and increased the risk of wildfire.

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