New Europe

October 30, 2020
The European Council has endorsed the objectives of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 and the nature protection and restoration targets contained therein, which aim at setting biodiversity on the path to recovery.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has once again shown us the fundamental importance of ecosystems and biodiversity for our health and economic and social stability,” Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety Svenja Schulze said. “Biodiversity is our life insurance: it supplies clean air and water, food, building material and clothing. It creates jobs and livelihoods. With the destruction of nature there is also the risk of disease outbreaks and pandemics. Saving biodiversity and global nature conservation is a key to preventing new infectious diseases. As President of the Council I am pleased that today we reached unanimous agreement on stepping up our efforts to address biodiversity loss,” she added.

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National Geographic

October 29, 2020
Absent major policy changes and billions of dollars invested in protecting land and wildlife, the world may see another major pandemic like COVID-19, an international group of scientists warned today.

Conserving biodiversity can preserve human lives, according to their new report, which reviews the latest research on how the decline of habitat and wildlife leaves humans exposed to new, emerging diseases.

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The Hill

October 23, 2020
On October 7, California Governor Gavin Newsom took the bold step of committing the state to a goal of protecting 30 percent of California’s land and coastal waters by 2030. 

The move makes a lot of sense for California. It is a global biodiversity hotspot because of its unique plant diversity, and harbors rich and productive marine ecosystems. But this bounty is threatened by the confluence of the climate crisis, overexploitation and development. Its latest manifestation has been the apocalyptic fires that have burned more than four million acres. 

California has very old trees, including the giant sequoias that are over 3,000 years old. There’s been a lot of fires in those 3,000 years, but the ancient forests survived, because fire was part of the ecology of the system. But the forests could not survive the human assault. Logging these natural treasures started a chain of events that led to the present fires, exacerbated by the heat waves caused by global warming.

The solution to the current crisis is protecting the wild, and restoring and rewilding degraded lands and coasts, in partnership with Indigenous Peoples. A commitment to 30 percent by 2030 — ‘30x30’ — is a great way to start.

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Campaign for Nature

October 23, 2020
Today, the Environment Council of the  European Union committed to protecting at least one-third of its land and seas  by 2030. The 30% protection target is a central component of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, which was formally and finally endorsed today by the European Union’s Environment Council after its May 2020 release by the European Commission. In the strategy, the EU also commits to advocating for the 30% target at the global level.

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The New York Times

October 23, 2020
The European Union’s Environment Council on Friday endorsed the proposal by the president of the European Union to create protected areas for 30 percent of the continent’s land and water by 2030, along with legally binding measures to tighten forest protections.

But Europe’s governing body also was criticized by environmental and climate activists for not curbing agricultural subsidies that drive pollution.

Britain, Canada and the state of California have made similar conservation pledges in recent months. Their promises, mostly without detailed road maps, come in the wake of a major United Nations-backed scientific report that calls for transformative changes in the way humans use the Earth’s land and waters in order to avoid dire consequences, including threats to the global food supply and health.

[…]

The conservation group, Campaign for Nature, approved the move, saying in a statement that “the litmus test will now be the effective implementation of the strategy,” particularly by the member nations of the European Union.

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The Guardian

October 22, 2020
A US senator has introduced a proposal to conserve 30% of the country’s lands and seas in the next 10 years, amid a surge of similar proposals.

The initiative, brought by the New Mexico senator Tom Udall last week, is called the “30 by 30” plan. In the US, 12% of land area is protected, according to Udall, mostly in Alaska and the west. If passed, the resolution would align the United States with international goals to protect and preserve nearly a third of the world’s land and water by 2030.

“The United States faces a conservation and climate crisis, with nature in a steep decline and greenhouse gas emissions not declining at the rate scientists say is needed,” according to the proposal. “Nature, like the climate, is nearing a tipping point.”

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Thomson Reuters

October 20, 2020
As recent headlines about forest blazes, melting glaciers and sinking islands have made clear, the natural world is in peril. And with repeated warnings about the grim state of biodiversity - and, at the same time, promising predictions about the role of nature in boosting our economies and protecting our health - we need a change in the way we are protecting nature, more than ever before. 

Right now, government officials in countries around the globe, from Canada to Australia, are beginning to take note of a solution critical to a global effort to stop the breakdown of nature. That is partnering with indigenous peoples and local communities who have successfully conserved the biodiversity on their lands for millennia, using traditional knowledge passed down through generations. 

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Scuba Diving

October 19, 2020
Loss of tourism revenue from continued COVID travel restrictions is straining the budgets of marine protected areas around the world, reducing conservation activities and stressing the communities reliant on a steady flow of eco-tourists. These strains come as the push to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030 gains global momentum.

[…]

“There is a myth, right? That we have to choose between the economy and the environment,” said Dr. Enric Sala. An ecologist, Sala is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who founded the Pristine Seas program and is one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nature. Both initiatives aim to persuade world leaders to establish new marine protected areas.

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The Independent

October 15, 2020
Last month, political leaders from 64 countries around the world all pledged to “reverse biodiversity loss” in the next decade by protecting 30 per cent of land and ocean by 2030.

This 30x30 goal aims to preserve lands, waterways and seas, in order to protect the natural world and fight the climate crisis.

A new study highlights the huge impact returning 30 per cent of ecosystems to their natural state would have, both in terms of saving huge numbers of species, and in reducing levels of the dangerous greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Some 27 researchers from 12 countries contributed to the report, which assessed forests, grasslands, shrublands, wetlands and arid ecosystems.

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Mongabay

October 9, 2020
In 2010, the member nations of the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 195 countries plus the EU, agreed that at least 17% of global land and 10% of the ocean needed to be protected by 2020.

A new global review finds that many countries have fallen short of these targets, and the expansion of protected areas over the past 10 years has not successfully covered priority areas such as biodiversity hotspots and areas providing ecosystem services.

The research team overlaid maps of protected areas, threatened species, productive fisheries, and carbon services, and found that 78% of known threatened species do not have adequate protection.

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China Dialogue

October 8, 2020
Originally scheduled as a last push for world leaders to connect before the COP15 negotiations on a global deal for nature protection, the ongoing pandemic downgraded the UN’s biodiversity summit into more of a push of the reset button.

The meeting, streamed live from New York, featured speeches by more than 100 heads of state, and other dignitaries including Prince Charles and chiefs of multiple UN bodies.

The summit was preceded by the launch of the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, a high-level initiative to commit to reverse nature loss by the end of the decade. The text of the pledge stresses the links between climate change, nature degradation, human health, poverty and inequality, and economic security.

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The Mercury News

October 7, 2020
Saying more needs to be done to preserve nature as a way to help address climate change, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday committed the state to a goal of protecting 30% of California’s land and coastal waters by 2030.

Newsom signed an executive order directing the state’s Natural Resources Agency to draw up a plan by Feb. 1, 2022, to achieve the goal in a way that also protects the state’s economy and agriculture industry, while expanding and restoring biodiversity — the vast variety of animals and plants — that live in areas as varied as the Bay Area’s tidepools to arid deserts in Southern California to mountain forests across the Sierra Nevada.

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The Christian Science Monitor

October 2, 2020
A new framework for defending the environment is emerging across the world allowing people to sue on behalf of the environment. More than 60 leaders signed a Pledge for Nature at the U.N. summit this week.

From Bolivia to New Zealand, rivers and ecosystems in at least 14 countries have won the legal right to exist and flourish, as a new way of safeguarding nature gains steam, U.S. environmental groups said on Thursday.

Rights of nature laws, allowing residents to sue over harm on behalf of lakes and reefs, have seen “a dramatic increase” in the last dozen years, said the groups the Earth Law Center, International Rivers, and the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice.

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Eureporter

October 2, 2020
On 30 September President Ursula von der Leyen represented the EU at the UN Biodiversity Summit in New York which brings together world leaders to step up global actions for nature and confirm their determination in agreeing a new ambitious global biodiversity framework at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, planned for 2021.

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Mongabay

September 29, 2020
In the midst of a planetary biodiversity crisis, 71 world leaders have endorsed the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.

Jacinda Ardern, Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Justin Trudeau, are among those who signed the pledge, stating the world is in a “state of planetary emergency: the interdependent crises of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and climate change” and that this emergency requires “urgent and immediate global action.”

News of the leaders’ participation, announced Sept. 28, comes ahead of the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity this week. It builds upon mounting support for a science-based target: to protect 30% of the planet by 2030, which is included in the most recent draft of the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity as one of its 20 post-2020 strategies.

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