Our Daily Planet

December 20, 2020
In November of 2020, the government of Tristan da Cunha, a four-island archipelago in the South Atlantic, announced that it is creating the fourth-largest marine “no-take” reserve in the world. The new marine reserve will encompass 265,347 square miles, making it almost three times larger than the United Kingdom. Tristan da Cunha, a British territory, will protect 90% of the waters around the island chain by banning fishing, mining, and other extractive activities. What makes it so special? “This is a place that has a unique ecosystem that is found nowhere else,” National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala remarked, ant is notable for its kelp forests and as a critical nursery for blue sharks.

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Latercera - OpEd

December 18, 2020
El Covid-19, el cambio climático y la extinción masiva de especies nos están golpeando al mismo tiempo. Estas tres calamidades tienen un mismo origen: hemos desconocido que la naturaleza tiene un límite.

El modelo económico actual, abrazado por Chile y la mayoría de los países en el mundo, está poniendo nuestra supervivencia en riesgo. La mejor ciencia disponible pronostica que, de seguir en esta trayectoria, tendremos eventos climatológicos cada vez más extremos, más sequías e inundaciones, mayores olas de calor y frío, millones de desplazados climáticos, más incendios, nuevas pandemias, colapso de las pesquerías comerciales y la extinción de un millón de especies. Todo esto provocará más muertes que el coronavirus.

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Campaign for Nature

December 17, 2020
The Campaign for Nature has issued the following responses:

Director of Campaign for Nature, Brian O’Donnell said:

“Representative Deb Haaland is an outstanding pick to lead the Department of the Interior.  She has been a leader in the Congress in protecting lands and wildlife and advancing equity and social justice. This is a proud day for the United States.  A department that has disenfranchised Indigenous people and dispossessed them of their territories throughout its history will now be run by an Indigenous woman.  Her nomination won’t right the wrongs of the past, but it is a step forward that is long overdue.”

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Our Daily Planet

December 17, 2020
Yesterday President-elect Joe Biden announced key nominations and appointments of his climate team:

• Congresswoman Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior

• Governor Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of Energy

• Michael Regan, EPA Administrator

• Brenda Mallory, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality

• Administrator Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor

• Ali Zaidi, Deputy National Climate Advisor

A team that AP described as “dealmakers and fighters.”

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Indian Country Today - OpEd

December 17, 2020
Our lands, waters, and tribal communities are currently under siege from biodiversity loss and climate change impacts. As tribal leaders, we recognize that threats to nature and our climate are direct threats to our tribal nations. Progress to safeguard our wildlife and lands in the U.S. has slowed to a near standstill in recent years.

The Trump Administration has taken unprecedented actions to eliminate protections for critical conservation areas and species. Protected areas serve a crucial role in conserving biodiversity, culturally important ecosystems, and mitigating climate change impacts.

President-elect Joe Biden and Congresswoman Deb Haaland are taking direct action to safeguard our environment through an initiative called Thirty by Thirty (30x30) to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.

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Xinhua Net

December 16, 2020
Multilateral institutions and governments should harness traditional knowledge, practices and innovations possessed by indigenous people in order to revitalize the biodiversity conservation agenda, experts said on Tuesday evening.

Speaking at a virtual forum for indigenous communities' leaders from Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Latin America, the experts said that forest dwellers, hunter-gatherers and nomads are endowed with expertise that can be tapped to strengthen protection of habitats.

"We need to recognize the contribution of indigenous people to the global conservation agenda," said Viviana Figueroa, a legal expert from International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

Figuero said that indigenous communities have for centuries demonstrated prowess in conserving biodiversity hotspots that underpin global food, energy and water security.

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EFE Verde

December 15, 2020
Leaders and representatives of indigenous peoples have asked this Wednesday that the aspirations and ambitions of their peoples be included, recognized and integrated in the process of drawing up the Biodiversity Treaty of the United Nations Convention on the Biological Diversity (CBD).

According to the leaders at the virtual press conference, the zero draft of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework - which will be adopted next year at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the CBD and will set the global agenda for the next 30 years with the objective of guaranteeing the protection of nature - it does not reflect or take into account the aspirations of indigenous peoples.  

"We ask the States to advance in this treaty and recognize the rights, contributions (of indigenous peoples) and our health and sovereignty systems," said the coordinator of the Program for the Management of Natural Resources with Indigenous Peoples of Central America, Ramiro Batzin.

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Reuters

December 12, 2020
Five years ago, when the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change was adopted, storing planet-warming carbon in ecosystems such as tropical forests, wetlands and coastal mangroves was not seen as a major part of the solution.

Now officials and environmentalists say goals to limit global temperature rise cannot be met without nature’s help.

Ahead of a U.N. “Climate Ambition Summit” to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord on Saturday, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they said threats to plants, wildlife, human health and the climate should be confronted together.

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Campaign for Nature

December 11, 2020
On the 5th anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement, Nature Based Solutions are emerging as  essential climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. In 2015, the biodiversity agenda and the climate agenda were seen as two separate tracks.  It is now widely believed that protecting ecosystems could provide at least a third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030 under the Paris Climate Agreement. In the wake of Covid 19 and the growing understanding of the interdependence of biodiversity, climate and human health and their compound threat, it has become clear that the natural world should be included in climate solutions, and that global leaders should address all three crises in an integrated manner. 

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UNEP

December 9, 2020
A green pandemic recovery could cut up to 25 per cent off predicted 2030 greenhouse gas emissions and bring the world closer to meeting the 2°C goal of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds.

UNEP’s annual Emissions Gap Report 2020 finds that, despite a dip in 2020 carbon dioxide emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise in excess of 3°C this century.

However, if governments invest in climate action as part of pandemic recovery and solidify emerging net-zero commitments with strengthened pledges at the next climate meeting – taking place in Glasgow in November 2021 – they can bring emissions to levels broadly consistent with the 2°C goal.

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NPR

December 8, 2020
President-elect Joe Biden wants to conserve 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030. It's part of a global push to avoid the worst effects of climate change and the decline of the natural world.

National Geographic

December 4, 2020
When the heads of state of 14 nations sat down together in late 2018 to discuss the grim condition of the world’s oceans, there was no certainty that anything consequential would result. The leaders planned 14 gatherings, but met only twice before the pandemic upended their talks.

So when the group announced this week the world’s most far-reaching pact to protect and sustain ocean health, it signaled a bit more than a noteworthy achievement in a complicated time. The agreement, negotiated via the nuance-free tool of video conferencing, also offered hope of a renewed era of global accord on climate, where issues grounded in science might finally trump political posturing.

Overall, the 14 leaders agreed to sustainably manage 100 percent of the oceans under their national jurisdictions by 2025—an area of ocean roughly the size of Africa. Additionally, they vowed to set aside 30 percent of the seas as marine protected areas by 2030, in keeping with the United Nations’ campaign known as “30 by 30.”

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The Washington Post

December 2, 2020
This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U.N. State of the Climate report published Wednesday.

To mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris accord, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres summarized the findings in unusually stark terms.

“To put it simply,” he said in a speech at Columbia University, “the state of the planet is broken.”

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Campaign For Nature

December 2, 2020
Today, the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), composed of 14 serving world leaders, is putting forward a new ocean action agenda for building a sustainable ocean economy where protection, production and prosperity go hand in hand. In addition to releasing commitments and policy actions designed to transform how the world can protect and use the ocean and ultimately sustainably manage humanity’s impacts on it, the Ocean Panel will also release a new comprehensive report spotlighting ways to accelerate, scale and finance ocean action. 

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The Guardian

December 2, 2020
Humanity is facing a new war, unprecedented in history, the secretary general of the UN has warned, which is in danger of destroying our future before we have fully understood the risk.

The stark message from António Guterres follows a year of global upheaval, with the coronavirus pandemic causing governments to shut down whole countries for months at a time, while wildfires, hurricanes and powerful storms have scarred the globe.

Guterres said: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help to solve it.”

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