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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The Highland County Press

May 8, 2021
The Biden administration plans to broadly define conservation and encourage private landowners to adopt sustainable practices to meet a goal of protecting 30 percent of the land and water in the U.S. by 2030, according to a multi-agency report published Thursday.

The recommendations are short of the most aggressive federal directives congressional Republicans feared would be central to reaching the administration’s “30 by 30” goal, but may still spark objections in a Congress deeply split on how the government should manage its public lands and deal with private landowners, particularly in the West.

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Mongabay

May 7, 2021
The world is brimming with bad news about people failing to take care of the Earth. But there is a way to change the narrative, says Canadian conservationist Harvey Locke. The key, according to him, is to strive for a “nature positive” world that is less about destruction and more about restoration.

“We know we’re on a rocket sled into the abyss, and we need to turn that around 100%, going the other direction on a rocket sled towards a positive solution,” Locke told Mongabay in an interview. “Tinkering is not possible. We can’t just [take] an old crystal radio set where you just kind of turn the dial a little bit [to] move from one station to another. It won’t work. We need to be on the internet, instead of listening to the radio — that kind of level of change.”

Locke is the lead author of a new paper published April 30, a few days before the start of a six-week virtual meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), an intergovernmental scientific advisory body to the parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At this meeting, the SBSTTA will provide advice on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, Guido Broekhoven, head of policy research and development at WWF, told Mongabay in an interview.

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PolitiFact

May 7, 2021
As part of his plan to put the brakes on climate change, President Joe Biden set a goal of conserving 30% of America’s land and waters by 2030. For land in particular, that’s a heavy lift — only about 12% of the nation’s land is now under some form of protection.

Biden’s target is part of a larger international ambition to protect a third of the world’s land and waters by 2030. On a global scale, the protected regions would do a lot of work to pull carbon from the air and store it in the soil, coral reefs, sea grasses and other carbon sinks. The effort goes under name 30 by 30, or 30x30.

But some advocates for indigenous peoples see a threat in the international push to protect land.

One of those groups, Survival International, calls the global 30x30 plan "the biggest land grab in history." We dug in to see where that figure comes from, and whether it represents a reasonable estimate of the likely harm due to the 30x30 plan.

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LesEchos

May 5, 2021
À l'époque, il fallait neuf heures pour aller de Denver à Aspen en voiture et vous traversiez des espaces infinis et merveilleux ! », confiait Hansjörg Wyss au magazine National Geographic en se remémorant sa découverte des montagnes Rocheuses, dans les années 1950. Le jeune Suisse avait décroché un job d'été au sein du Colorado Highway Department et tomba dès lors et pour toujours amoureux de la beauté sauvage de l'Ouest américain. Il vit aujourd'hui dans le Wyoming, le moins peuplé des Etats américains, qui comptent parmi ses trésors les parcs nationaux de Yellowstone et de Grand Teton.

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Wall Street Journal

May 6, 2021
The Biden administration wants to preserve wildlife habitats by expanding collaboration with private landowners and state and local governments, with less emphasis on putting more land under federal protection, according to a report issued Thursday.

The report, “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful,” provides a preliminary outline of how the administration can pursue a goal President Biden has set to conserve 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030.

Mr. Biden adopted the 30% target from scientists and environmentalists who say it can help stem animal and plant extinctions, threats to water and food supplies and other environmental crises.

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Campaign For Nature

May 6, 2021
Today the Biden administration released its “America the Beautiful” report. The report lays out guidance for the implementation of the administration’s ambitious plan to protect 30% of the U.S.’s land and sea by 2030.

It provides a vision for a first-of-its-kind decade-long, locally led nationwide effort across public, private, and Tribal lands and waters to restore and conserve America’s lands, waters, and wildlife buoyed by federal support. The report made clear that private land conservation efforts will be voluntary.  

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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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Inside Climate News

May 5, 2021
No matter how many solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars are built between now and 2030, the world won’t meet its increasingly ambitious climate targets without a lot of help from forests, fields and oceans. 

“Achieving net-zero by 2050 will not be possible without nature,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said on April 22 at the online climate summit hosted by President Joe Biden as she opened a session on nature-based climate solutions. “The impact of greenhouse gas pollution from extreme heat and storms is having a devastating effect on our lands and oceans. At the same time, nature provides us with solutions.” 

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PHYS.ORG

May 4, 2021
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) could support transformative change in environmental sustainability—to address major societal challenges, including the climate crisis—according to a new paper from Oxford researchers.

But, the team warns, there must be a move away from the narrow framing of what nature can 'do' for society to an integrated approach, where solutions are understood as place-based, activated by people in partnership with nature.

This issue has real world implications for the way nature becomes an integrated part of the response to environmental challenges. For example, positioning the action of tree planting as simply a way to mitigate climate change, rather than a dynamic relationship between people and nature, is over simplistic. This is not conducive to transformative change and perpetuates a separation between people and nature.

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Mongabay

April 29, 2021
Combining data from ground-based techniques and remote monitoring using airborne devices offers new opportunities to monitor nature-based solutions (NbS) to mitigate floods, droughts, heatwaves, landslides, storm surges and coastal erosion, according to a new study.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, NbS are actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing “human well-being and biodiversity benefits.” Since 2008, nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) as a resource and cost-efficient measure to complement the limitations linked with the grey-engineered approach.

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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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National Geographic

April 23, 2021
For hundreds of years, Indigenous communities in what is now British Columbia cleared small patches amid dense conifer forest. They planted and tended food and medicine-bearing trees and plants—sometimes including species from hundreds of miles away—to yield a bounty of nuts, fruits, and berries. A wave of European disease devastated Indigenous communities in the late 1700s, and in the 1800s, colonizers displaced the Indigenous people and seized the land. The lush, diverse forest gardens were abandoned and forgotten.

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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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