Photograph by: Enric Sala, National Geographic
April 28, 2020
The Wyss Campaign for Nature released a new report this morning spotlighting the critical leadership indigenous and local communities are providing to safeguard the planet’s vulnerable lands, oceans, and wildlife. The report documents the unique perspective of four community leaders who are immersed in successful, indigenous- and community-led conservation projects in four different countries.
April 27, 2020
A group of biodiversity experts warned that future pandemics are on the horizon if mankind does not stop its rapid destruction of nature.
Writing an article published Monday by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the authors put the responsibility for COVID-19 squarely on our shoulders.
"There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic – us. As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity – particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones," the authors wrote on IPBES.
April 23, 2020
A growing number of influential conservationists and scientists believe that the key to keeping the planet habitable is to protect half of the Earth. The rapid expansion of humans goes unabated, with the burning and bulldozing of nature, destruction of ecosystems, and the driving of species into extinction.
Conservation biologist E.O. Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, with the idea of saving half the planet, since future extinction rates will be a thousand times higher than ever before.
April 22, 2020
Academy of Sciences Malaysia senior fellow Emeritus Professor Tan Sri Dr Zakri Abdul Hamid has been appointed ambassador and science adviser to the global Campaign for Nature, a partnership between the Wyss Campaign for Nature and the National Geographic Society.
April 22, 2020
Earth Day is celebrated each year on April 22 and this year marks the 50th anniversary since the campaign first launched. The event encourages increased awareness of the environment as well as actions and commitments that will reduce the negative impacts humans have on the planet.
Fighting climate change is central to Earth Day and some of the actions that the campaign recommends include using less electricity, taking public transit or walking instead of driving and other choices that reduce our carbon footprint. In addition to these individual behaviours, climate scientists say that more conservation efforts are needed to ensure that ecosystems can continue absorbing the large amount of carbon dioxide that we release.
April 22, 2020
Across the United States, 20 million people of all ages and backgrounds united on April 22, 1970 to protect our planet and build an environmental movement from the ground up to chart a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable future. The people who lent their voices to the first Earth Day created a groundswell of political change that helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency and enact bedrock conservation laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Parents demanded change for their children, children demanded change for their future — and progress was won.
It was during this time that my father, former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, sounded the alarm about the creeping destruction of nature — what he termed ‘The Quiet Crisis.’
April 22, 2020
Today, as the world celebrates the 50th Earth Day, individuals and leaders around the world are reimagining our relationship with nature. There is a growing recognition that the accelerating destruction of nature is contributing to the major challenges of our time: climate change, mass wildlife extinction, and more clearly than ever this year, the spread of infectious diseases.
April 21, 2020
Scientists say that more conservation efforts are needed to ensure that ecosystems can continue absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide.
Earth Day is celebrated each year on April 22 and this year marks the 50th anniversary since the campaign first launched. The event encourages increased awareness of the environment as well as actions and commitments that will reduce the negative impacts humans have on the planet.
April 20, 2020
We need to start creating a “new normal” that lets us live within nature and not at its expense.
That’s the call from the Algoa Bay branch of the Wildlife and Environment Society of SA (Wessa), which was responding on Sunday to recent statements by the World Economic Forum and heavyweight collective Campaign for Nature on the coronavirus and the G20’s post-pandemic restructuring plans.
April 16, 2020
Conservation groups say nature must be a cornerstone of economic recovery plans for the sake of people, health and economies.
The call comes amid fears of a "spike in poaching" as rural communities lose vital income.
In Cambodia, 1% of the entire population of one critically endangered bird was wiped out in a single event.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said three of only a few hundred remaining giant ibis were poisoned.
April 15, 2020
This week, finance ministers from the Group of Twenty (G20) and central bank governors are meeting to lay out an economic recovery plan to address the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on all countries, including the world’s poorest economies.
April 10, 2020
[…] As top predators, harpy eagles play a crucial ecological role, keeping populations of prey species in check; their presence in a forest is indicative of a healthy, functioning environment. No one knows how many remain in the wild, but scientists do know that they’re disappearing. The giant raptors once lived from southern Mexico to northern Argentina, but since the 19th century their range has declined by nearly half, leaving the Amazon with 93 percent of the species’ remaining occupied habitat. Deforestation—the primary threat to harpy eagles’ survival—shows no signs of slowing. Last year, the world watched as massive tracts of the Amazon went up in flames, and right now 45 acres of Brazilian Amazon are being razed every hour.
April 8, 2020
Pernod Ricard's vice president of global sustainability Vanessa Wright discusses the company's approach to regenerative agriculture and biodiversity and why more people will be focusing on natural climate solutions moving forward.
April 7, 2020
Australia's Great Barrier Reef has experienced its most widespread bleaching event on record, with the south of the reef bleaching extensively for the first time, a new survey has found.
This marks the third mass bleaching event on the reef in just the last five years and scientists say that the rapid warming of the planet due to human emissions of heat-trapping gases are to blame.
Aerial analysis conducted by Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, and others from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, found that coastal reefs along the entire length of the iconic reef -- a stretch of about 1,500 miles (2,300 kilometers) from the Torres Strait in the north, right down to the reef's southern boundary -- have been severely bleached.
April 6, 2020
The United Nations's acting head of biodiversity is calling for a global prohibition of so-called wet markets where live and dead wild animals are kept in cages and sold for human consumption.
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, told The Guardian in an interview published Monday that “the message we are getting is if we don’t take care of nature, it will take care of us."
The comments came as officials around the world ramp up their calls for countries such as China to crack down on wildlife markets that are believed to play a leading role in the spread of infectious diseases.
