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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PHYS.ORG

January 21, 2021
It is no secret that over the last few decades, humans have changed nature at an ever-increasing rate. A growing collection of research covers the many ways this is impacting our quality of life, from air quality to nutrition and income. To better understand how which areas are most at risk, scientists have combed through volumes of literature to present global trends in the relationship between human wellbeing and environmental degradation.

Their work, which included Fabrice DeClerck from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, was summarized in "Global trends in nature's contributions to people", which was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This systematic review builds on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment Report, which in 2019 provided the most comprehensive assessment yet of nature's decline and biodiversity loss, when it emphasized that 1 million plant and animal species face extinction.

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Frontiers in Conservation Science

January 13, 2021
We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

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ABC News

January 11, 2021
PARIS -- Protecting the world's biodiversity was on the agenda Monday for world leaders at the One Planet Summit, which was being held by videoconference due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The one-day summit will focus on four major topics: protecting terrestrial and marine ecosystems; promoting agroecology, a more sustainable way to grow food; increasing funding to protect biodiversity; and identifying links between deforestation and the health of humans and animals.

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UN Climate Change News

January 11, 2021
In a virtual address today at the ‘One Planet Summit’ for biodiversity hosted by the French government in cooperation with the United Nations and the World Bank, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared 2021 as “the year to reconcile humanity with nature.”

He highlighted both the need to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and to provide adequate finance to adapt to the impacts of climate change, which include more frequent and more severe incidents of drought, flooding and fires.

While we have been abusing our planet as if we had a spare one, he said, ‘nature is striking back’, with record-high temperatures and collapsing biodiversity. Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, however, provides an opportunity to change course: “With smart policies and the right investments, we can chart a path that brings health to all, revives economies, builds resilience and rescues biodiversity,” he said, citing nature-based solutions such as Africa’s Great Green Wall as being especially promising.

At the One Planet Summit, a new 'High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People' was launched. The 50-State coalition committed to protecting 30% of land and seas worldwide by 2030 and calls on all States to join before the UN Biodiversity Summit COP15. And the Sahel region's Great Green Wall Initiative got a major boost, receiving at least 14 billion US dollars in new funding.

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The Guardian

January 11, 2021
A coalition of more than 50 countries has committed to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030 to halt the destruction of the natural world and slow extinctions of wildlife.

The High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, which includes the UK and countries from six continents, made the pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans before the One Planet summit in Paris on Monday, hosted by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

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Eurasian Review

January 11, 2021
Biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing challenges humanity faces today. All the recently published reports on biodiversity – the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, the Living Planet Report, the Global Forest Resources Assessment Report and the Global Biodiversity Outlook – toll alarm bells pointing out the failure of global commitments in terms of biodiversity conservation.

According to the Living Planet Index (LPI) 2020, decline was captured for the 68% of the monitored population (i.e. 20,811 populations of 4,392 species) for the period of 1970-2016. 

The LPI “is a measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species from terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats adopted by the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to track the progress”.

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Smithsonian Magazine

December 31, 2020
Since 1970, 4,392 mammals, amphibians, birds, fish and reptile species’ population sizes declined by 68 percent, according to a World Wildlife Fund report released this year. Animals living in Latin America and the Caribbean took the biggest hit; their population sizes decreased by 94 percent. Habitat destruction is cited as the leading cause of these massive losses. The United Nations’ Global Biodiversity Outlook report produced similarly grim results. The document took inventory of 196 countries committed to recovering biodiversity as determined by the 2010 Aichi Biodiversity Targets. As dictated by the Aichi agreement’s ten-year plan, countries were to achieve certain recovery milestones like preventing the spread of invasive species and conserving protected areas. Most of the goals were not achieved or only partially met.

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New York Times - OpEd

December 21, 2020
To slow extinctions and climate change, President-elect Joe Biden has embraced a plan to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and 30 percent of its ocean waters by 2030. It is perhaps the most ambitious commitment to conservation by a U.S. president. How he proceeds will determine whether he unites or further divides Americans in a pivotal decade for the planet.

The plan is known as “30 by 30.” Behind the catchy phrase is a simple, scientifically informed belief that conserving 30 percent of the planet’s land and 30 percent of its water is required to protect roughly 75 percent of Earth’s species and slow climate change by storing carbon in plants and soil. In the words of a former interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, 30 by 30 is “a kind of synthesizing, consolidating, organizing possibility.”

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Indian Country Today - OpEd

December 17, 2020
Our lands, waters, and tribal communities are currently under siege from biodiversity loss and climate change impacts. As tribal leaders, we recognize that threats to nature and our climate are direct threats to our tribal nations. Progress to safeguard our wildlife and lands in the U.S. has slowed to a near standstill in recent years.

The Trump Administration has taken unprecedented actions to eliminate protections for critical conservation areas and species. Protected areas serve a crucial role in conserving biodiversity, culturally important ecosystems, and mitigating climate change impacts.

President-elect Joe Biden and Congresswoman Deb Haaland are taking direct action to safeguard our environment through an initiative called Thirty by Thirty (30x30) to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.

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Reuters

December 12, 2020
Five years ago, when the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change was adopted, storing planet-warming carbon in ecosystems such as tropical forests, wetlands and coastal mangroves was not seen as a major part of the solution.

Now officials and environmentalists say goals to limit global temperature rise cannot be met without nature’s help.

Ahead of a U.N. “Climate Ambition Summit” to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord on Saturday, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they said threats to plants, wildlife, human health and the climate should be confronted together.

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National Geographic

December 4, 2020
When the heads of state of 14 nations sat down together in late 2018 to discuss the grim condition of the world’s oceans, there was no certainty that anything consequential would result. The leaders planned 14 gatherings, but met only twice before the pandemic upended their talks.

So when the group announced this week the world’s most far-reaching pact to protect and sustain ocean health, it signaled a bit more than a noteworthy achievement in a complicated time. The agreement, negotiated via the nuance-free tool of video conferencing, also offered hope of a renewed era of global accord on climate, where issues grounded in science might finally trump political posturing.

Overall, the 14 leaders agreed to sustainably manage 100 percent of the oceans under their national jurisdictions by 2025—an area of ocean roughly the size of Africa. Additionally, they vowed to set aside 30 percent of the seas as marine protected areas by 2030, in keeping with the United Nations’ campaign known as “30 by 30.”

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The Washington Post

December 2, 2020
This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U.N. State of the Climate report published Wednesday.

To mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris accord, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres summarized the findings in unusually stark terms.

“To put it simply,” he said in a speech at Columbia University, “the state of the planet is broken.”

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The Guardian

December 2, 2020
Humanity is facing a new war, unprecedented in history, the secretary general of the UN has warned, which is in danger of destroying our future before we have fully understood the risk.

The stark message from António Guterres follows a year of global upheaval, with the coronavirus pandemic causing governments to shut down whole countries for months at a time, while wildfires, hurricanes and powerful storms have scarred the globe.

Guterres said: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help to solve it.”

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Visual Capitalist

November 24, 2020
Earth’s biodiversity has seen an overall decrease across the globe. And while each region has seen a decline, some places have experienced higher drops than others.

Using data from WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020, we’ve ranked each region from the greatest average loss in biodiversity, to the least:

Latin America and Caribbean has seen the most loss, with a 94% drop in average species populations, while Africa comes in second with a 65% drop.

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