Aljazeera - OpEd

June 2, 2021
Humanity faces a herculean task to reverse climate change and protect the natural world that supports us. We must retool human society to live in harmony with nature – all while leaving space for people in developing nations to prosper and grow.

We want this to happen immediately. But we must be realistic. Even if everyone starts immediately to turn their promises on climate change and nature loss into action – as they should and must – we are looking at decades of work.

To buy time to complete these transformations, particularly the transition to zero-carbon economies, we need fast-acting and simple solutions. Solutions that slow climate change, restore nature and biodiversity, protect us against pandemics, allow us to produce more food, create jobs, reduce inequalities, build peace.

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World Economic Forum

May 27, 2021
Unsustainable economic growth has had devastating consequences for ecosystems that are under threat from climate change, species extinction and water insecurity. And now it's time for a rethink of our relationship with nature.

Approximately $133 billion is invested annually in nature-based solutions (Nbs), according to a new report - State of Finance for Nature: Tripling investments in nature-based solutions by 2030 - from the United Nations and World Economic Forum.

Domestic government bodies are responsible for the largest proportion of today’s Nbs – $113 billion – aimed at protecting biodiversity and landscapes, and conducting activities like sustainable forestry. The private sector contributes a further $18 billion to fund sustainable supply chains and environmental offsets.

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Mongabay

May 25, 2021
The planet’s wildlife is disappearing at unprecedented rates and ecosystems are deteriorating rapidly, according to a growing number of studies. This is why the world’s largest biodiversity conference, COP15, taking place later this year, could be an important moment for the planet.

But one of the only ways to achieve the world’s biodiversity goals and save nature is to include human rights at the heart of all conservation policies, and recognize the cultural and territorial rights of Indigenous and local peoples, according to a new report.

Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) actively conserve at least 22% of the world’s key biodiversity regions, an area approximately the size of Africa, says a report by the international conservation association ICCA Consortium.

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The Leaflet

May 24, 2021
In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global biodiversity framework to reverse biodiversity loss and its impacts on ecosystems, species and people. The conference is being held during a moment of great urgency: According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have less than 10 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to stave off catastrophic climate change. At the same time, climate change is exacerbating the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Half of the planet’s species may face extinction by the end of this century.

And tragically, according to a UN report, “the world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade.”

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Campaign for Nature

May 20, 2021
Today, the ICCA Consortium released its Territories of Life: 2021 Report. The report includes the most up-to-date analysis of how much of the planet is likely conserved by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, estimating that they are conserving more than 22% of the extent of the world’s Key Biodiversity Areas on land and at least 21% of the world’s lands. The report also found that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the de facto custodians of many existing state and private protected and conserved areas, without being recognized as such, underscoring the critical need for equitable governance and the importance of ensuring that all existing and new protected and conserved areas fully respect Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights.

In addition to providing updated spatial analyses and related findings, the report details 17 case studies of territories of life from five continents, highlighting concrete examples of how Indigenous Peoples and local communities sustain our planet and describing what types of actions are needed to better support them, their rights, and their contributions to biodiversity.

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The Guardian

May 19, 2021
An area greater than the land mass of Russia has been added to the world’s network of national parks and conservation areas since 2010, amid growing pressure to protect nature.

As of today, about 17% of land and inland water ecosystems and 8% of marine areas are within formal protected areas, with the total coverage increasing by 42% since the beginning of the last decade, according to the Protected Planet report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

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Campaign For Nature

May 19, 2021
Today, the United Nations and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched a final report card on progress towards Aichi Target 11 – the global 10-year target on protected and conserved areas that expired in 2020. 

The report finds that the size of protected areas has grown significantly, with the 17% target for land-based conservation and the 10% goal for ocean conservation nearly met. This progress demonstrates the ability of protected area targets to help drive action from countries around the world, and the report authors make it clear that more protections are needed moving forward in order to help address the crisis of global biodiversity loss. They note that there are still many areas important for biodiversity and ecosystem services that lack protection, and they highlight that the entire network of protected and conserved areas must be more effectively managed.  

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Global Landscapes Forum

May 18, 2021
The past couple of years have seen a wave of reports on Earth’s biodiversity and its dire state, finding that 1 million species are under threat of extinction and that populations of monitored animals have declined 68 percent since 1970. But how much are these scientific findings making it through to the zeitgeist? Are their numbers changing how much people care?

A new report released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), found that the number of people engaging in conversations and actions on biodiversity loss numbers hundreds of millions and is on the rise. This “eco-wakening,” as the report deems the trend, is most quickly climbing in Asia and emerging markets, with top growth and engagement rates in India, Pakistan and Indonesia, as measured between 2016 and 2020.

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The Conversation

May 11, 2021
President Joe Biden calls climate change “the existential crisis of our time” and has taken steps to curb it that match those words. They include returning the U.S. to the Paris Agreement; creating a new climate Cabinet position; introducing a plan to slash fossil fuel subsidies; and announcing ambitious goals to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

But climate change is not the only global environmental threat that demands attention. Scientists widely agree that loss of wildlife and the natural environment is an equally urgent crisis. Some argue that biodiversity loss threatens to become Earth’s sixth mass extinction. But unlike efforts to fight climate change – which center on clear, measurable goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – there is no globally accepted metric for saving biodiversity.

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SciTechDaily

May 8, 2021
A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management.

Lead author Felicia Keesing is a professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She explains, “There’s a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But this turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn’t a threat to us, it’s actually protecting us from the species most likely to make us sick.”

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The Hill

May 8, 2021
How much do you know about the natural world around you? According to a recent survey by SWNS Digital, a majority of people know less than one might assume. 

The results of the survey revealed to researchers some of the common misconceptions that people have about the “shrinking natural world,” like the incorrect assumption that it is more concerning for the environment when an animal goes extinct rather than a plant or insect. According to the survey of 2,000 respondents, approximately 64 percent believed this to be true. 

The survey also revealed that the average person believes that the planet loses 101 species per year to extinction, when in reality the number is actually at least 100 times that amount. 

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Euractiv - OpEd

May 6, 2021
This autumn, world leaders and top scientists will be heading to the UN Biodiversity summit in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. The summit, also known as COP15, is the epicentre of global biodiversity governance.

Originally scheduled for October 2020, the meeting was postponed due to the pandemic, a crisis highlighting the disruptive entanglement of humans and nature.

It is time for political leaders to demonstrate their courage and resolve: this COP15 meeting must be the “Paris moment” for nature. Although biodiversity and nature loss has not yet achieved the level of political response that led to the Paris Agreement, species loss is increasingly recognised as a global challenge just as significant as, and highly related to, climate breakdown.

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Campaign For Nature

April 27, 2021
Last week, at Biden’s Earth Day Summit, world leaders made bold and sweeping pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions—a critical step toward achieving the Paris climate agreement. At the same time, heads of state from France, the U.K., Germany, Gabon and Costa Rica, among others speaking at the Summit, made the powerful case that we can’t solve the climate crisis without tackling the biodiversity crisis. 

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The Guardian

April 25, 2021
When Kawésqar national park was formed in the Chilean part of Patagonia in 2019, just one ranger was responsible for an expanse the size of Belgium. Its fjords, forests and Andean peaks are a precious wilderness – one of the few remaining ecosystems undamaged by human activity, alongside parts of the Amazon, the Sahara and eastern Siberia.

Chilean officials hope that Kawésqar will, one day, meet the high standards for protected areas laid out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and make it on to the organisation’s “green list”.

The IUCN’s green list of protected and conserved areas is less well known than its red list of threatened species. But this week, 10 more sites – in Switzerland, France and Italy – achieved green list status, bringing the total to 59 sites in 16 countries. Contamines-Montjoie national nature reserve near Mont Blanc was among seven added in France, increasing the country’s sites to 22, the highest number in the world. About 500 sites in 50 countries are working to meet the 17 requirements on good governance, planning, management and preservation of nature to achieve this status.

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Washington Post

April 23, 2021
As scientists rush to preserve biodiversity, they often focus on untouched landscapes teeming with life. But how untouched are they? Not as much as you might think.

A study shows that over the past 12,000 years, nearly three-fourths of nature has been shaped by humans — and that traditional land uses actually encouraged biodiversity.

The paper, published in the journal PNAS, challenges existing notions about the history of land use. Past assessments have argued that as late as the 16th century, the majority of land on Earth was uninhabited.

But when an international team of researchers tested those assumptions, they uncovered a different story. By overlaying data on human populations and land use throughout history with information on biodiversity, they found that contrary to the common belief that only untouched land has high biodiversity, it actually existed and flourished in land shaped by humans.

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