Reuters

February 2, 2021
Humans have built up their economic wealth by going hugely overdrawn with the bank of nature, which is in deep trouble and must be reassessed as a valuable and finite asset, an academic review commissioned by the British government said on Tuesday.

The Dasgupta Review on the economics of biodiversity concludes that standard monetary measures of prosperity, such as gross domestic product, have excluded vital services provided by natural systems, such as water provision and climate protection.

As a result, forests, oceans and the wildlife they sustain have become dangerously degraded to a point that seriously threatens human society, as well as plants and animals.

To rectify this, business, governments and other institutions should boost efforts to price and understand the value of what nature provides and the costs of its loss, while easing unsustainable pressure on natural resources, the report said.

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Campaign For Nature

February 2, 2021
Destined to be as critically important as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review was commissioned by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was released on February 2. 

The Dasgupta Review marks a major inflection point in global political economic discourse that puts forward a new economic paradigm in the same way that Adam Smith did in his time. The review calls for urgent and transformative change in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity, and the natural world. As decision makers worldwide begin to rebuild economies in the wake of Covid 19, this Review should be a guide and catalyst for fundamental change.

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China Daily

January 29, 2021
China is looking forward to seeing ambitious but balanced conservation targets that fully consider developing countries' capabilities at this year's United Nations biodiversity conference, a senior Ministry of Ecology and Environment official said.

The conference, known as COP 15, was originally scheduled to be held in Kunming, Yunnan's provincial capital, in October. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was postponed to May.

"In light of current circumstances, there are still uncertainties over COP 15," Cui Shuhong, director-general of nature and eco-conservation at the ministry, told a news conference on Thursday.

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Our Daily Planet

January 29, 2021
In an open letter, 450 elected officials from all around the U.S. support President Biden’s Executive Order action this week to protect 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. The officials hope that the president will lead a swift and aggressive campaign to combat global warming and the extinction crisis through conserving land and ocean spaces for the benefit of nature. Biden has also pledged to reverse a number of the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, many of which reduced protections for key public lands and infringed on Indigenous sovereignty.

Why This Matters: As this letter makes clear, parks and access to nature are important to Americans across the country – in red and blue states.  During his time in office, Trump rolled back protections for countless public lands, including areas like Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments in Utah, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The rollbacks, meant to clear the way for development, largely failed to attract buyers in Alaska, but fossil fuel companies bought up enough land in the Western U.S. at the end of the Trump administration to continue oil drilling for years.

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Treehugger

January 28, 2021
Earth’s biodiversity is in trouble. A landmark 2019 assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.1 At the same time, human actions have dramatically transformed 75 percent of the Earth’s surface and 66 percent of its ocean ecosystems.

To solve this problem, a group of more than 50 countries have come together under the banner of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People and pledged to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. The initiative is being referred to in the media as HAC 30x30.

“Our future depends on preventing the collapse of the natural systems that provide our food, clean water, clean air and stable climate,” Rita El Zaghloul, HAC coordinator at the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica, told Treehugger in an email. “In order to preserve these crucial services for our sustainable economies, we must protect enough of the natural world to sustain them.”

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World Economic Forum

January 27, 2021
Climate change is having a substantial impact across the world. Rising temperatures, disrupted water supplies and flooding have already displaced tens of millions of people. Drought and extreme weather events threaten food production and supply chains. At the same time, our exploitation of nature has lead to the destruction of 32% of the world’s forests, 40% of invertebrate pollinators face extinction, and land surface productivity has shrunk by 23% due to land degradation. Without unprecedented action, global warming is set to reach 4.1-4.8°C above pre-industrial levels with 50% percent of species facing extinction by the end of the century. 

But the call for action is being heard. Net-zero commitments by companies have more than doubled in the past year, with many companies also making commitments to protect nature. For example, Amazon is investing $10 million to restore 1.6 million hectares of forest in the US; Shell is planting 5 million trees in the Netherlands; and Unilever has committed to a deforestation-free supply chain by 2023.

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Vox

January 27, 2021
Biden took the next leap in pursuing his climate agenda Wednesday, signing the latest in a spate of environment-focused executive orders. One of the most ambitious goals buried in the order he put forward is to conserve nearly a third of US land and ocean waters by 2030.

Currently, only 12 percent of the country’s land and 26 percent of its oceans are protected, according to a 2018 report by the Center for American Progress. This was achieved by slowly expanding protected areas over the past few decades — until former President Trump took office. In his first year, his administration dramatically shrank two Utah monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — the largest removal of federal land from protection in US history, according to the New York Times. Now the Biden administration will have to quickly reverse course to meet the new goal.

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National Geographic

January 27, 2021
In an executive order issued on January 27 to address the climate crisis, President Joe Biden ordered a pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands and created a White House office of environmental justice. He also quietly committed his administration to an ambitious conservation goal—to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and coastal seas by 2030.

That target, referred to as “30 by 30” by the conservation community, is backed by scientists who argue that reaching it is critical both to fighting climate change and to protecting the estimated one million species at risk of going extinct.

The U.S. is currently conserving around 26 percent of its coastal waters but only about 12 percent of its land in a largely natural state, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

To reach the 30 by 30 target will require conserving an additional area twice the size of Texas, more than 440 million acres, within the next 10 years. The White House has yet to specify who will oversee the initiative at the federal level and which lands and waterways might be prioritized

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CNBC

January 26, 2021
The richest of the rich are polluting the world and driving climate change, while the poorest of the poor suffer the greatest consequences, according to a new report published Monday by Oxfam International. 

The richest 1% of the global population have used two times as much carbon as the poorest 50% over the last 25 years, the nonprofit’s report says.

When fossil fuels (which are carbon-based) are burned in factories or jets, for example, carbon dioxide is produced. Carbon dioxide emissions trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, resulting in the warming of the planet. The burning of fossil fuels and processes that generate carbon dioxide emissions are major drivers of economic productivity and wealth. 

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Campaign for Nature

January 27, 2021
Today's announcement by President Biden is a win for the people of the United States and the rest of the world, the environment, and the economy. Only by protecting the earth's climate and biodiversity can we truly be on a path to an inclusive and prosperous future for humanity.

 By promising to set the United States on a path to conserve 30% of the U.S by 2030 (30x30) – on land and at sea – President Biden has proposed the most ambitious conservation agenda of any president in American history. Such vision addresses the scale of the challenges facing our climate and the natural world. Only by rapidly accelerating the pace of conservation will we stand a chance to slow the warming of our planet and prevent a climate catastrophe, and to reverse the loss of biodiversity, which many experts have warned is the beginning of a Sixth Mass Extinction and the collapse of humanity’s life support system. 

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German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research

January 26, 2021
Since the founding of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, member states have regularly agreed on global strategies to bring the increasingly rapid loss of biodiversity to a halt. In 2002, the heads of state adopted the so-called 2010 biodiversity targets. Eight years later, little progress had been made and 20 new, even more ambitious goals were set for the next ten years. Last year, it became clear that this target had been missed, too. The loss of biodiversity continues unabated.

This year, new targets are being negotiated again - this time for 2030. The decisions are to be made at the Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming, China. To ensure that the mistakes from previous years will not be repeated, Chinese researchers led by Prof Haigen Xu from the Nanjing Institute for Environmental Research in cooperation with Prof Henrique Pereira (iDiv, MLU) have presented an analysis of the causes of this failure, focusing primarily on implementation in the individual member states.

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Mongabay - OpEd

January 25, 2021
The year of 2020 was envisioned as a potential turning point for global conservation efforts. Major events such as the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the IUCN World Conservation Congress were expected to raise biodiversity conservation to the top of the global agenda. These and other major events aimed to foster greater links between biodiversity, climate, and development goals. New conservation initiatives and ambitions such as a ‘global deal for nature’ were being advanced to try and increase conservation impact and investment.

Now, the world is a very different place as we head into the new year. Over the past nine months COVID-19 has created an unprecedented social, economic, and public health crisis on a global scale. The pandemic’s impacts have been augmented by additional political and social crises encompassing fundamental issues such as race, democracy, and inequality. The events of the past year take place within the wider context of the biodiversity and climate crises, of which conservationists are all too aware. We are living and working in a period of crises layered within crises.

But such extraordinary circumstances also create new, unique opportunities, often in unexpected ways, for systemic change. As societies respond and adapt, opportunities emerge for changing how conservation is conceptualized, practiced, and funded. The conservation field now has a unique opportunity to accelerate efforts to build a stronger, more dynamic, more resilient field – one that can truly face up to the challenges of the present global ecological crisis.

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Brookings

January 25, 2021
The global public health and economic devastation caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak dramatically reinforces the urgent imperative to minimize the chances of another zoonotic pandemic. Reducing the likelihood of another viral spillover sweeping the world requires a fundamental change in how we interact with nature. It requires minimizing human interface with wild animals and wild spaces; eliminating transmission points where the likelihood of viral spillover to humans is high, such as unhygienic commercial markets in wild animal meat and live animals; better monitoring of the legal trade in wildlife; diligently suppressing illegal and unsustainable trade in wildlife; and conserving natural habitats. Conserving natural habitats in turn requires profound changes in human food production and human encroachment on remaining natural habitats. Decisionmaking about pandemic prevention and nature conservation must be elevated to the highest levels of governments on a permanent basis. Such changes will not be easy or cheap, but they are necessary.

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The Hill

January 25, 2021
The leader of the United Nations warned Monday of “existential threats” to the global climate and biodiversity. 

Speaking to the World Economic Forum, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that today’s world suffers from “fragility,” invoking issues such as the coronavirus pandemic and resulting job losses. 

“We also see fragility in the climate and biodiversity crisis. Both are existential threats, and both are getting worse,” Guterres said. 

“We are waging war on nature and destroying our life support system, and nature is striking back,” he added. 

Later in his speech, he said 2021 is the “make-it-or-break-it year” and called on countries to commit to reaching carbon neutrality. 

“We need to make sure that countries present their nationally determined contributions in 2021 with a dramatic reduction in emissions up to 2030,” he added, referring to national goals to reduce emissions. 

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EcoWatch

January 25, 2021
In 2010, world leaders agreed to 20 targets to protect Earth's biodiversity over the next decade. By 2020, none of them had been met. Now, the question is whether the world can do any better once new targets are set during the meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Kunming, China later this year.

To help turn the tide, a group of 22 research institutions have come together to develop four steps to protect life on Earth, the Environment Journal reported.

"The upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting, and adoption of the new Global Biodiversity Framework, represent an opportunity to transform humanity's relationship with nature," the researchers wrote in One Earth Friday. "Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, including mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in society."

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