Financial Times - OpEd

September 13, 2021
It is often believed that the financial sector can survive any crisis and that investors always find a way to bounce back and make more money. It took about four years for the markets to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, and only a few months to return to pre-pandemic levels.

The biodiversity crisis will be different. The markets took a quarter of a century to recover from the Great Depression in 1929. They will probably take a similar time to rebound once the mass extinction of species is fully underway by 2030. Biodiversity loss, set to be one of the largest environmental crises of all times, will collapse economies and societies. If the financial sector wants to survive it must move now, fast and at scale.

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South China Morning Post

September 6, 2021

The plan was launched three years ago with the goal of protecting a quarter of China’s land and sea areas and reversing some of the air and water pollution brought about by breakneck growth.

Using a series of “red lines”, various zones were demarcated across the country to safeguard endangered species and their habitats, as well as restore ecologically fragile areas.

Environmental red lines have been drawn in 15 provinces and municipalities, including Beijing and areas along the Yangtze River, and covering more than 2.4 million sq km.

The Ecological Conservation Red Line initiative remains an ambitious strategy but breaches of the zones persist and strict implementation is needed to ensure compliance, according to an environmental group in southern China.

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EuroNews

September 3, 2021
A major conference on biodiversity opens in the French city of Marseille on Friday.

Over 1,000 governmental and civil society organisations will discuss how to protect some of the one million species threatened by human actions.

"The answer is very simple. We have natural capital. We have nature. We were taking, and taking, and taking for decades to build up our society. Now we should stop," Bruno Oberle, director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told Euronews.

"We should take less and we should reinvest in this natural capital more. So taking less and giving more back to nature. This means, for example, bigger conservation area, well managed, well-protected at the right places, 30% of the surface of the planet until 2030."

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Global Citizen

August 31, 2021
By now you've probably heard of COP26 — the shorthand name for the next major UN climate summit, rescheduled for November in Glasgow after being delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic.

But another big "Convention of the Parties" (COP) starts a month earlier — one that is far less talked about but also critically important. That is COP15: the two-part UN biodiversity summit that will kick off in October online and finish next May in the southern Chinese city of Kunming.

Efforts to protect the natural world have yet to achieve the same high profile as those to limit climate change, despite advocacy by British naturalist David Attenborough and many others.

Losses of crucial ecosystems like rainforests and wetlands, as well as animal species, have accelerated even as governments, businesses, financiers, and conservation groups seek effective ways to protect and restore more of the Earth's land and seas.

So what is COP15, and what does it hope to achieve?

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Thomson Reuters

August 27, 2021
China and African nations are pushing for the establishment of a multi-billion-dollar "global biodiversity fund" to help developing countries meet goals agreed in a new pact being negotiated to protect nature, U.N. officials and observers said.

About 195 countries are expected to finalise a new accord to safeguard the planet's plants, animals and ecosystems at a two-part U.N. summit due to culminate in May next year in the southern Chinese city of Kunming.

The difficulty of meeting face to face because of the COVID-19 pandemic meant the summit was postponed three times and then split into two, with the first virtual session scheduled for October and preparatory discussions now underway.

Basile van Havre, co-chair of the talks under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, said China and a number of mainly African countries are proposing a new biodiversity fund to help finance the goals of the pact, once agreed.

"The idea of increasing funding is a good one and we all welcome this," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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Landscape News

August 19, 2021
Public development banks (PBDs) have a vital role to play in promoting greater investment in biodiversity and nature-based solutions in the countries where they lend, according to a new report on biodiversity finance produced ahead of the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) of the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).

Its findings and recommendations are based on research carried out by a team headed by Leon Bennun, chief scientist at The Biodiversity Consultancy and Renaud Lapeyre, an independent expert with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for Nature France, and funded by the WWF.

The main aim, says Lapeyre, is to support and accompany these banks and their partners in transforming their models toward contributing to nature-positive finance and reducing investments that harm biodiversity.

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Global Citizen

August 16, 2021
For thousands of years, the natural world has allowed human societies to flourish by providing food, water, and materials for shelter and medicine. But the environments that supply these resources — bodies of water, fertile landscapes, tropical forests — are being depleted at an ever-accelerating pace.

The planet’s ecosystems can tolerate only so much extraction on an annual basis; beyond these limits, they can’t replenish and rebound to their normal levels. In 2021, countries exceeded the planetary limit on July 29, meaning 5 full months of natural resource extraction will take place in environments that have already been functionally exhausted.

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The Nature Conservancy

August 10, 2021
We are living through a make-or-break chapter in the story of life on Earth. In the last 50 years alone, vertebrate populations have declined by 68 percent. Today, a full third of freshwater and marine species face extinction, while countless invertebrates could disappear before we realize their full importance to their ecosystems.

Humanity occupies a unique position in this climax. Our actions this decade could either restore the ecological balance or tip it, causing species that rely upon one another within ecosystems to fall like dominoes—with devastating outcomes for human well-being. However overwhelming it sounds, there is good news hidden in these facts: We can still change how this story unfolds.

We still have a chance to save species—and ourselves—if we act now.

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ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability

August 6, 2021
Over the past two decades, ICLEI, through its Cities Biodiversity Center (CBC), has worked closely with the United Nations Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a range of partners to elevate the voice of local and subnational governments and ensure that strong action is taken to create vibrant cities and regions, where people and biodiversity can thrive.

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G20

July 22, 2021
The G20 Environment Ministers’ Meeting ended today in Naples with the approval of an important joint communiqué, the outcome of weeks of negotiations.

The document is based on three macro areas.

1) Biodiversity: protection of natural capital and restoration of ecosystems with solutions based on nature, defense and restoration of the soil, protection of water resources, oceans and seas including the prevention and reduction of marine plastic litter.

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Edie

July 7, 2021
More than 100 investors, including the likes of Aviva and M&G Investments, representing $4.2trn in assets under management have written to some of the world's biggest banks, calling on them to strengthen climate and biodiversity targets this year.

Convened through the ShareAction coalition, 115 investors have written to 63 leading banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, calling on them to beef up environmental commitments ahead of key summits this year.

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Green Queen

June 25, 2021
Until now, many of our global efforts to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change have been done separately from each other. Scientists are now calling for a new approach that takes both issues as intrinsically linked—we can’t solve one without the other.  

This is the core message of what is the first collaborative report between experts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). According to the team of 50 scientists selected by the 12-person committee selected by the two bodies, biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and are mutually reinforcing. 

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Thomson Reuters Foundation

June 16, 2021
By now you've probably heard of COP26 - the shorthand name for the next major U.N. climate summit, rescheduled for November in Glasgow after being delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic.

But another big "Convention of the Parties" (COP) is taking place a month earlier - one that is far less talked about but also critically important. That is COP15: the U.N. biodiversity summit planned for China in October.

Efforts to protect the natural world have yet to achieve the same high profile as those to limit climate change, despite advocacy by naturalist David Attenborough and many others.

Losses of crucial ecosystems like rainforests and wetlands, as well as animal species, have accelerated even as governments, businesses, financiers and conservation groups seek effective ways to protect and restore more of the Earth's land and seas.

Read More

The China Dialogue

June 16, 2021
A lot of money is needed to prevent spiralling biodiversity loss; somewhere between US$598 billion and US$824 billion a year, according to the Nature Conservancy and Paulson Institute. The good news is that around half of that could be met with existing finance, redirected from activities that damage nature to those that enhance it.

The bad news is countries already agreed to do this in 2010, but most failed to even identify what subsidies they were promoting that caused problems, never mind reform them. The value of subsidies that harm biodiversity has been estimated to be five or six times higher than finance for promoting conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The issue is still very much alive. The draft text of the Kunming agreement – the successor to the failed 2010 Aichi targets – includes a target to reform subsidies, and eliminate those that are most harmful to biodiversity so that incentives are positive or at least neutral for biodiversity by 2030. The EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy published last year also supports phasing out subsidies that harm biodiversity.

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Mongabay

June 14, 2021
The push to halt climate change too often neglects the interconnected issue of biodiversity loss, according to a recent report from a panel of scientists with the United Nations.

“What we want to emphasize here is how relevant biodiversity conservation is for climate change mitigation,” said Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in a press conference launching the June 10 report.

In a first-ever collaboration, scientists from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and IPBES teamed up to draw on research looking at the convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, how they’re affecting all life, including humans, on Earth and what’s being done about them.

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