National Geographic

August 9, 2021
Climate change has already touched every corner of the planet and will continue to reshape the human experience for centuries to come, its impacts intensifying as warming grows, scientists warn.

The 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) the planet has warmed since the preindustrial period has pushed Earth toward irreversible change, some of which is unavoidable. But decisive action to cut emissions quickly and thoroughly—keeping total temperature rise as low as possible—can greatly reduce the risks of crossing further dangerous thresholds that would put the planet even more at risk, according to a massive new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released Monday.

“In order to stabilize climate, we have to stop emitting immediately, full stop,” says Charles Koven, one of the report authors and a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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MirageNews

August 5, 2021
Improving ecosystem integrity is essential to ensuring human and planetary wellbeing. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are working to adopt a consistent and accurate method to define and measure ecosystem integrity. In the new paper recently published in Conservation Letters, “Towards monitoring forest ecosystem integrity within the Post-2020 biodiversity framework“, scientists and biodiversity experts from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and eight other leading institutions share a pathway to fill this critical gap.

While ecological integrity often goes undefined, this new joint paper establishes a quantifiable definition for it, delineating ecological integrity as a measure of the structure, function and composition of an ecosystem compared to pre-industrial levels. Then, building from metrics, such as the Global Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network’s (GEO BON) Essential Biodiversity Variables, the authors recommend eight key indicators to evaluate ecological integrity, indexing vital markers such as deforestation, species habitat, biodiversity loss or ecosystem resilience. The paper demonstrates how advances in earth observations can be harnessed to track these metrics, providing a clearer picture of the earth’s valuable ecosystems and a way to measure progress towards our biodiversity goals.

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Landscape News

June 1, 2021
The world must triple its investments in nature-based solutions by 2030 and quadruple them by 2050 in order to meet the climate change, biodiversity and land degradation targets of the three Rio Conventions, according to a new UN report.

Total investments of USD 8.1 trillion are necessary by mid-century to protect the landscapes and biodiversity that are essential to human life on Earth. This would involve a gradual increase in funding until an annual rate of USD 536 billion is reached by 2050. 

Currently, only USD 133 billion flows into nature-based solutions each year, which would create a shortfall of USD 4.1 trillion, the report said.

The State of Finance for Nature analysis was produced by UN Environment (UNEP), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative to quantify existing investment in nature-based solutions and to estimate the funding needed to prevent systemic economic risks from the rapid loss of nature. 

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The Guardian

April 15, 2021
Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests.

These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding no intact areas left.

The researchers suggest reintroducing a small number of important species to some damaged areas, such as elephants or wolves – a move that could restore up to 20% of the world’s land to ecological intactness.

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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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Nature

February 18, 2020
The conservation community must be able to track countries’ progress in protecting wetlands, reefs, forests and more, argue James Watson and colleagues.

[…]

Since 2010, targets for conserving species have shaped policy and galvanized efforts to halt species loss worldwide, as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Yet no such targets exist for ecosystems — despite the wealth of evidence showing that their health and functions are essential to the processes that maintain all life.

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Phys.org

January 27, 2020
A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows.

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