Forbes

March 30, 2020

Pictures of clean Venice canals, dolphins in Cagliari and swans in Milan were all around the internet last week and - many argued - were signs of nature healing itself when people are not around. While air is undoubtedly less polluted because of a drop in greenhouse gases’ emissions, the impact of self-isolation on the environment is less than thought.

In fact, nature has been healing long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced most people at home and it will continue to do so with the help of good policies.

“It’s a result of a longer trend, because, if those species were declining, they wouldn’t show up even during the coronavirus lockdown,” Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe, explained to Forbes.com. “We have to be very careful when we make those connections, although it may be very attractive to draw a conclusion. But of course, animals will behave differently when everything is quiet and they will show up more easily close to cities and villages.”

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The Conversation

March 30, 2020

A little more than a year ago, the Haida Nation released the Land-Sea-People plan to manage Gwaii Haanas, off the coast of northern British Columbia, “from mountaintop to seafloor as a single, interconnected ecosystem.”

It’s an innovative conservation effort that demonstrates how the Haida Nation and Canada’s federal government can achieve biodiversity targets, protect the rights of Indigenous people and encourage collaboration among communities, governments and society. And it’s an example of what we need more of to meet conservation objectives in the coming decade.

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New Strait Times - OpEd

March 25, 2020
As the global Covid-19 crisis dramatically underlines, the fate and wellbeing of people relies on the health of the planet. Planetary health is a term referring to human health “and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”.

The novel coronavirus looks increasingly like an expression of our failure to understand this link, as demonstrated by our disruption of ecosystems. It was in 1980 that non-governmental organisation (NGO) Friends of the Earth first articulated the need to enlarge the World Health Organisation’s definition of health, asserting that “personal health involves planetary health”. 

The next decade, the late Norwegian physician Per Fugelli warned: “The patient Earth is sick. Global environmental disruptions can have serious consequences on human health. It’s time for doctors to give a world diagnosis and advice on treatment.”

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Financial Review

March 24, 2020

As the COVID-19 catastrophe has unfolded, a significant broadening of the landholdings of Indigenous Australians has taken place, with about 88,000 hectares of beautiful, rich Murrumbidgee floodplain country in south-western NSW handed back to its traditional custodians, the Nari-Nari people.

No figure for the value of the land has been given by Nature Conservancy, which facilitated the complex sale and handover process with the NSW government. However, an earlier federal estimate put it at $44 million.

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SDG Knowledge Hub

March 23, 2020

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, on 23 March 2020, CBD Acting Executive Secretary Elizabeth Mrema announced that the dates for this meeting would be adjusted. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place from 15-28 October 2020. 

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ACB

March 20, 2020

The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) and the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) will conduct a three-day online training on the use of the Bioland tool, an online platform designed to help parties to the CBD in the curation and sharing of biodiversity data.

The webinar, which will run from 25 to 27 March 2020, serves as a preliminary activity to the Regional Workshop for the ASEAN on National Clearing-House Mechanisms, which was originally slated for 8 to 12 March 2020 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but was postponed due to growing concerns on the spread of the Coronavirus disease or COVID-19.

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The Independent

March 20, 2020
The novel coronavirus will not be the last pandemic to wreak havoc on humanity if we continue to ignore links between infectious diseases and destruction of the natural world, environmental experts have warned.

Dr Enric Sala, marine ecologist and part of National Geographic’s Campaign For Nature, told The Independent: “I’m absolutely sure that there are going to be more diseases like this in future if we continue with our practices of destroying the natural world, deforestation and capturing wild animals as pets or for food and medicine.”

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ZME Science

March 19, 2020
Farmlands can act as havens for wildlife species in a world where climate change is eroding their habitats, a new study explains. However, for that to happen, a shift needs to be made towards mixed cultures. Such a change would also make the farms themselves more resilient against climate changes, which would also benefit us and help solidify the global food supply against environmental shocks.

Although the study focused on bird species in Costa Rica, the team explains that birds can serve as a “natural guideline” for the health of other animal families throughout the world, as well.

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BBC

March 18, 2020
As humans continue to rapidly expand the scope of their domination of nature – bulldozing and burning down forests and other natural areas, wiping out species, and breaking down ecosystem functions – a growing number of influential scientists and conservationists think that protecting half of the planet in some form is going to be key to keeping it habitable.

The idea first received public attention in 2016 when E.O. Wilson, the legendary 90-year-old conservation biologist, published the idea in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. “We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along,” he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

Once thought of as aspirational, many are now taking these ideas seriously, not only as a firewall to protect biodiversity, but also to mitigate continued climate warming.

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Phys.org

March 18, 2020
A bird study led by the Australian National University (ANU) provides new understanding of the ways birds and mammals respond to a rapidly warming world.

The researchers say the findings offer insights into the pressures wild populations must manage in order to survive. The future survival of animal populations will depend on how they are able to respond to climate change. As well as changing location or advancing the timing of breeding to track the warming seasons, some animals have been showing shifts in average body size.

Despite theoretical predictions that body size will decline as temperatures rise, some species have increased in size. To date, no study has been able to account for the variation in size trends.

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The Guardian

March 18, 2020
As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.

Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

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The Narwhal - OpEd

March 17, 2020
There are moments in life that are etched into our collective consciousness forever. When the planes struck the World Trade Center. When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. When the world ground to a halt to help slow the spread of COVID-19. 

It’s during moments like these that we often shift how we think about the world — and about our place in it. 

It’s easy to feel invincible in a modern society in which we live longer than ever before, never have to see where our food comes from and can point a phone at the sky and have it tell us what constellation we’re looking at. 

And yet, despite all of the technological advancements of the last century, we are still rendered powerless to nature — to hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes and, yes, viruses. 

The story of COVID-19 is, at its core, a story of humanity’s ever-encroaching relationship with all other living things on this planet. 

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ensia

March 17, 2020
As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the novel coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.

Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

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Dialogo Chino

March 16, 2020

This year’s packed agenda of negotiations on climate change, biodiversity and the global ocean was supposed to address the fortunes of a living world in a critical condition. But the coronavirus pandemic is forcing drastic changes to the schedule.

The Covid-19 virus, which has infected more than 170,000 people, has hit hardest China and European countries, where several key meetings for achieving new environmental commitments have already been cancelled or postponed. More are in doubt.

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Forbes

March 16, 2020
[…] At the same time, the race is now on to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, ahead of any second wave of infections later this year.

[…]

Last week among the COVID-19 headlines, David Attenborough made a plea calling for Deep Ocean Seabed Mining to be banned.  One of the reasons he cited was the importance of deep water corals and microscopic microbes at the bottom of the ocean.

It turns out, these are extremely valuable for modern medicine, including addressing coronaviruses.

A protein from an ocean seabed algae found among coral reefs was revealed to show activity against another coronavirus known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS. 

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