Scientific American - OpEd

November 30, 2021
November 30 is the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, an informal holiday established in 2011 by a U.K.-based coalition of artists, scientists and activists. The point of the day is political: to draw public attention to human-caused extinctions, in hopes of preventing more. But for many participants the day is also personal, an attempt to grasp the enormity of extinction.

Every year brings more species to memorialize, and this year is no exception. Among this year’s newcomers are 23 species of plants and animals that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared extinct at the end of September. Had you heard of the turgid-blossom pearly mussel, the flat pigtoe mussel or the stirrupshell mussel? What about the Scioto madtom or the San Marcos gambusia, two freshwater fish? Me neither. These species, like so many others, went extinct before most of us even knew their names. 

We need a Remembrance Day for Lost Species. But if we want to protect life on a meaningful scale, we also need to remember the species we still have.

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The Statesman

November 14, 2021
It’s becoming increasingly clear that we not only need to adapt to protect vulnerable communities and natural habitats against climate change but we also need to look to nature as a regenerative solution, not just something that we need to protect, but something that will protect us, Google has stressed.

During the past two weeks at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), world leaders committed to averting the worst consequences of climate change.

“When we observe the Earth’s surface over the past few decades in Google Earth’s Timelapse, the immensity of the change to our natural environment is arresting,” said Nithya Sowrirajan, Director, Global Solutions, Google Earth and Earth Engine.“At Google, we’re keenly invested in preventing the worst effects of climate change, and helping our customers use Google Cloud technology to build a more sustainable future,” added Jen Bennett, Director, Office of CTO, Google Cloud.

It was 11 years ago at COP16 that the tech giant unveiled Google Earth Engine, an earth observation platform that combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with powerful analysis capabilities.

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ENDS Report

November 8, 2021
In a conversation with fellow economist Lord Stern at COP26, Sir Partha Dasgupta said that a ‘bold and imaginative’ response is needed to provide a financial incentive to protect globally valuable ecosystems.

“Rainforests are a global public good… and yet they are in national jurisdictions,” said Dasgupta, the author of a review of the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the Treasury. But the incentive that they have to protect such habitats is less than their value for the biosphere as a whole, posing an economic dilemma. There is a similar problem with the deep ocean, too: “nobody has to pay for it” when extracting resources such as fish or minerals, the professor said.

So a new body to protect global public goods, akin to the International Monetary Fund or World Bank but operating under the United Nations, should be established, he argued. They could charge for access, providing funding for the maintenance of ecosystem services.

A good deal of negotiation would be needed to set it up, of course – “but I think we should not fear that”.

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New York Times

November 2, 2021
In a sweeping accord aimed at protecting the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global warming, leaders of more than 100 countries gathered in Glasgow vowed on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030.

President Biden said the United States would contribute billions to the global effort to protect the ecosystems that are vital for cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink, and keeping the Earth’s climate in balance.

The pact — which also includes countries such as Brazil, Russia and China — encompasses about 85 percent of the world’s forests, officials said. It is one of the first major accords to emerge from the United Nations climate summit known as COP26, which is seen as a crucial moment in efforts to address climate change.
“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said in announcing the agreement, “are the lungs of our planet.”

President Biden said he would work with Congress to deploy up to $9 billion to the global effort through 2030. Additionally, governments committed $12 billion through 2025, and private companies pledged $7 billion to protect and restore forests in a variety of ways, including $1.7 billion for Indigenous peoples. More than 30 financial institutions also vowed to stop investing in companies responsible for deforestation.

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Bloomberg

November 1, 2021
One hundred countries, representing 85% of the world’s forests, have given themselves nine years to halt and reverse deforestation, in a major new commitment at global climate change talks on Tuesday.

Brazil, Russia, Canada, Colombia and Indonesia will be among the nations committing to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 at the third day of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in an initiative spearheaded by the conference host, the U.K.

The inclusion of Brazil, home to the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is crucial to the initiative and comes amid a turnaround in the country’s ambitions to reduce emissions and tackle deforestation. Across the world as a whole, an area of forest the size of 27 soccer pitches is lost every minute, according to the U.K.

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CNN

November 1, 2021
An arid region of open forests and grasslands spanning three countries and more than a quarter of a million square miles, this is Gran Chaco. It's the second-largest forest in South America after the Amazon, but has long been neglected, suffering from deforestation, agricultural expansion and the effects of climate change.

When Bolivian conservation biologist Erika Cuéllar first saw the vast expanse in 1997, she was overcome by an urge to restore it. "I am very attracted to arid lands. When I was young, I was angry that nobody cared about dry lands and everybody cared about tropical rainforest," she says.

Despite looking open and empty, the area is teeming with unique vegetation and wildlife, from jaguars and ocelots to piranhas and vipers. It's also home to nine million people, including several indigenous communities.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

October 26, 2021
Last week, leaders from around the world came together at a global summit to negotiate a comprehensive plan to safeguard nature around the world. 

Whether the resulting global strategy, expected to be finalized in 2022, is sufficiently ambitious and successful will be influenced by one item: the degree to which countries put advancing human rights, in general, and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, in particular, at the heart of their plans and real actions.

Science has recently shown what many of us have always known, that indigenous peoples and local communities have historically been and still are the best stewards of nature. Biodiversity is declining less on indigenous lands and traditional territories than elsewhere in the world, and an outsized proportion of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found in these areas. 

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The Guardian

October 14, 2021
The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a study on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

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Reuters

October 8, 2021
Global leaders will gather virtually next week to discuss protecting nature across the planet and experts say there's no time to lose. Animal and plant species are going extinct at a rate not seen in 10 million years.

The losses are accelerating, scientists say, thanks largely to climate change, deforestation, pollution, overfishing and urban development. To limit the loss, the United Nations has urged countries to commit to conserving 30% of their land – almost double the area now under some form of protection.

About 70 countries have committed to the target, which would include about a third of the world's land animals and plants, according to the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People.

China begins hosting the U.N. Conference on Biodiversity, known as COP15, in the city of Kunming on Monday, with most discussions taking place online because of COVID restrictions. A second round will be held next year.

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The New York Times

October 4, 2021
The world lost about 14 percent of its coral reefs in the decade after 2009, mainly because of climate change, according to a sweeping international report on the state of the world’s corals.

The report, issued late Monday, underscores the catastrophic consequences of global warming while also offering some hope that some coral reefs can be saved if humans move quickly to rein in greenhouse gases.

“Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong,” said David Obura, one of the report’s editors and chairman of the coral specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The 14 percent decline, he said, was cause for deep concern. “In finance, we worry about half-percent declines and half-percent changes in employment and interest rates.”

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The New York Times [Opinion]

September 30, 2021
Twin crises afflict the natural world. The first is climate change. Its causes and potentially catastrophic consequences are well known. The second crisis has received much less attention and is less understood but still requires urgent attention by global policymakers. It is the collapse of biodiversity, the sum of all things living on the planet.

As species disappear and the complex relationships between living things and systems become frayed and broken, the growing damage to the world’s biodiversity presents dire risks to human societies.

The extinction of plants and animals is accelerating, moving an estimated 1,000 times faster than natural rates before humans emerged. Bugs on our windshields are no longer a summer thing as insect populations plummet. Nearly three billion birds have been lost in North America since 1970, diminishing the pollination of food crops. In India, thousands of people are dying of rabies because the population of vultures that feed on garbage is cratering, resulting in a huge increase in feral dogs that eat these food scraps in the birds’ absence.

This past week, federal wildlife officials, as if underscoring the point, recommended that 22 animals and one plant be declared extinct. They include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish and a bat.

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New Straits Times

September 21, 2021
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is one of the foremost global organisations advocating the protection of nature.

Governments and civil society organisations convened in 1948 to create the IUCN to protect nature, encourage international cooperation, and provide scientific knowledge and tools to guide conservation.

IUCN played a fundamental role in creating the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971), the World Heritage Convention (1972), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, (1974) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992).

Today, with more than 1,300 members, including states, government agencies, non-governmental organisations and indigenous peoples' organisations, and thousands of supportive experts, IUCN continues to champion nature-based solutions, such as he United Nations' Paris climate change agreement and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

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The Guardian

August 18, 2021
A key United Nations biodiversity summit has been delayed for a third time due to the pandemic, the Chinese environment ministry has announced, as environmentalists pledged the delay would “not mean taking our foot off the pedal”.

In a statement, the Chinese ministry of ecology and environment confirmed that Cop15, the biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, would be delayed, and that negotiations for this decade’s targets will be split into two phases so that governments can meet face-to-face in Kunming, China, in the first half of 2022.

The talks had been scheduled for October this year after two previous delays due to the coronavirus pandemic. The first phase of the meeting, which will be largely procedural, will be held in the Chinese city between 11 and 15 October, with most people attending virtually. Countries will then negotiate the targets for the global biodiversity framework that governments will aim to meet by the end of the decade in Kunming from 25 April to 8 May 2022.

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Campaign For Nature

August 18, 2021
Following the first draft of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), officials announced today new dates for the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15). The biodiversity summit, where 196 countries will agree on an action plan for ending the nature crisis, is now scheduled to take place in two parts: virtually in October 2021 from the 11 to the 15 and in person April 25 through May 8, 2022 in Kunming, China. The Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI), and the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) will hold face-to-face meetings in January 2022 in Switzerland. 

The aim of the delay is to allow for equitable and safe face-to-face negotiations before and at COP15 which, due to the coronavirus pandemic, cannot happen before the initial date set for October 2021.  

Despite the meeting’s delay, the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, a coalition of 65 countries led by Costa Rica, France and the United Kingdom, are driving forward with ambitious plans to protect and conserve nature and donor nations are beginning to commit to increase finance for nature.

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China Dialogue

August 17, 2021
If we needed more proof of our biodiversity crisis, a herd of wild elephants marching through China has been doing the job in the most heart-warming way possible. They’ve been walking north from Xishuangbanna for months, and their antics – raising babies, getting drunk, barging down doors and turning on taps to drink – have captivated the public. But so have the more serious reasons for their unusual migration, which local experts say is probably caused by the destruction of primary forests outside protected areas, forcing elephants to find new places to roam.

As the Asian elephants reached the city of Kunming, its local government deployed an array of tactics to keep the herd out, blocking roads and laying trails of pineapples and sweetcorn to divert them.

Kunming will be clearing away the pineapple trails to welcome world leaders as China hosts the COP15 UN biodiversity conference. A herd of wild elephants walking through Yunnan is a powerful symbol of the urgency that’s forcing our nature crisis onto the agenda of global leaders.

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