One Earth - Commentary

July 23, 2021

The territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity and intersect about 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 2019 global assessment stressed the important role of these communities in biodiversity conservation by noting that 35% of the areas formally protected and 35% of all remaining terrestrial areas with very low human intervention are traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous peoples sustain nature because we know we are a part of nature. We realize that trying to bend nature to our will would harm us as well as the animals, plants, and ecosystems we all depend on. Instead, Indigenous peoples have a reciprocal relationship with our territories. We know that if we take care of the land, the land will take care of us. And so, we honor our cultural responsibility to be careful stewards. When these relationships are respected and when the rights and responsibilities of Indigenous peoples are recognized and supported, the entire planet will benefit. Our territories span massive, vibrant areas that serve as sanctuaries for humans, animals, and plants; hold massive amounts of carbon; and ensure the health of our water and air. These lands—and the Indigenous relationship to them—have global significance, especially as governments seek ways to achieve increasingly urgent biodiversity and climate goals.

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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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Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

June 28, 2021
As countries and companies make net-zero promises, nature’s role in absorbing carbon and offsetting emissions has received increasing attention. 

Investing in nature - or so called nature-based solutions - is seen by players from oil majors, agricultural giants to local governments as the key to removing carbon and achieving net-zero.

Carbon removal, or negative emissions, is now central to most net-zero pledges.

For my community, the Maasai pastoralists of Kenya, nature-based solutions are nothing new: ensuring that nature remains intact has always been a central part of how we operate.

Our traditional nature-based solutions have long been recognized as one of the most effective means of restoring ecosystem health and reversing degradation in drylands. In maintaining healthy ecosystems, we have ensured that forests can hold and capture more carbon, helping keep emissions down.

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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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Landscape News

June 24, 2021
Even though Indigenous communities protect some of the most critically important forest ecosystems, conserving a wealth of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and carbon storage, they remain woefully shortchanged with aid money for climate mitigation, receiving less than 1 percent of such earmarked funding. While development aid for climate mitigation is more than USD 30 billion annually across the globe, support to Indigenous communities for tenure and forest management adds up to an annual USD 270 million, according to a new report put out by Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN).

What’s more, the amount Indigenous communities receive directly is even less, as most of that funding flows through large organizations. Only a little over USD 46 million a year goes to projects that include the name of an Indigenous or local community in the project implementation description. This is an indication, says RFN senior policy advisor Torbjørn Gjefsen, of how few climate mitigation projects are done in direct cooperation with Indigenous peoples.

“It’s an appalling mismatch between the needs, opportunities and resource commitments from donors,” says Alain Frechette, executive director of the Rights and Resources Institute. “Donors and governments need to shift the balance in favor of rights-based actions.”

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World Economic Forum

June 23, 2021
G7 leaders recently announced that “our world must not only become net zero, but also nature positive, for the benefit of both people and the planet.”

This represents a real paradigm shift in how nations, businesses, investors and consumers view nature. In the past, the mantra among a growing number of inspired leaders has been to do less harm, to reduce impact and to tread lightly across our world. Of course, this mantra remains.

But now there is a new worldview gathering pace: "nature positive." This asks: What if we go beyond damage limitation? What if our economic activities not only minimize impact, but also enhance ecosystems?

A nature positive approach enriches biodiversity, stores carbon, purifies water and reduces pandemic risk. In short, a nature positive approach enhances the resilience of our planet and our societies.

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Borneo Bulletin

June 22, 2021
The United Kingdom (UK) COP26 Presidency and the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) recently co-convened ‘ASEAN-UK COP26: Framing the Future for Nature and Climate’, a virtual event exploring the important role that ecosystems, like forests, wetlands, and marine and coastal areas, play in combatting climate change.

The event discussed best practices and experiences from across the ASEAN region, and discussed the need to scale up ambition on nature-based solutions on climate and biodiversity. In addition, the event showcased the findings of the ‘Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity’, and the applicability of its findings to the ASEAN region.

It was also an opportunity to bring the region together in preparation for the regional and global meetings, including the Third ASEAN Conference on Biodiversity, the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all taking place this year, with the UK presiding over COP26, in partnership with Italy.

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World Economic Forum

June 21, 2021
The twin crises of nature loss and climate change are inextricably linked. For too long, however, biodiversity loss and climate change have been discussed and dealt with in siloes, even by independent international frameworks of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. We may, however, be at an important turning point.

For the first time, intergovernmental scientific bodies for each global challenge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have worked together on a report, which is the result of a co-sponsored workshop of 50 climate and biodiversity experts. The report finds that we can either solve both crises or solve neither.

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New Straits Times

June 16, 2021
Scientists and policymakers recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected, but in practice they are largely addressed in their own domains.

Followers of the biodiversity loss crisis, therefore, welcomed last week's report on a joint workshop by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Science-Policy Advice on Ecosystems and Biodiversity (IPBES).

Since 1992, when the two issues (along with desertification) became the subject of individual United Nations treaties, biodiversity has never received the same level of global attention accorded to climate. However, neither will be successfully resolved unless they are tackled together and urgently. That was the main takeaway from the report by 50 leading experts jointly chosen by the IPCC and IPBES.

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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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New York Times

June 13, 2021
President Biden joined with leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations on Sunday to take action aimed at holding down global temperatures, but failed to set a firm end date on the burning of coal, which is a primary contributor to global warming.

Mr. Biden and six other leaders of the Group of 7 nations promised to cut collective emissions in half by 2030 and to try to stem the rapid extinction of animals and plants, calling it an “equally important existential threat.” They agreed that by next year they would stop international funding for any coal project that lacked technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions and vowed to achieve an “overwhelmingly decarbonized” electricity sector by the end of the decade.

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Campaign for Nature

June 13, 2021
Today G7 Heads of State announced a joint commitment to a historic “Nature Compact” during their meeting in Cornwall, UK.  The Nature Compact is the most wide-ranging and ambitious set of coordinated actions to address the crisis facing nature ever agreed to by G7 countries. 

 Three of the Campaign for Nature’s key priorities feature prominently in the G7 Nature Compact, including:

• An agreement to support new global targets to protect and conserve at least 30% of global land and at least 30% of global ocean by 2030.  The agreement states that the nations will lead by example by effectively protecting and conserving the same percentage of their national land, inland waters and coastal and marine areas by 2030.   

• A commitment to prioritize the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in co-design, decision-making and implementation of the systems change needed for the Nature Compact’s success.

• A pledge to dramatically increase investment in nature from all sources including the percentage of public climate finance directed towards nature.  

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Wired

June 10, 2021
Humanity is struggling to contain two compounding crises: skyrocketing global temperatures and plummeting biodiversity. But people tend to tackle each problem on its own, for instance deploying green energies and carbon-eating machines, while roping off ecosystems to preserve them. But in a new report, 50 scientists from around the world argue that treating each crisis in isolation means missing out on two-fer solutions that resolve both. Humanity can't solve one without also solving the other.

The report is the product of a four-day virtual workshop attended by researchers of all stripes, and is a collaboration between the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In light of the Paris Agreement, it’s meant to provide guidance on how campaigns that address biodiversity might also address climate change, and vice versa.

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New York Times

Some environmental solutions are win-win, helping to rein in global warming and protecting biodiversity, too. But others address one crisis at the expense of the other. Growing trees on grasslands, for example, can destroy the plant and animal life of a rich ecosystem, even if the new trees ultimately suck up carbon.

What to do?

Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels.

“These two topics are more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chairman of the scientific steering committee that produced the report. They are also inextricably tied to human well being. But global policies usually target one or the other, leading to unintended consequences.”

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Campaign for Nature

June 10, 2021

A new, peer-reviewed report by 50 climate and biodiversity experts released today asserts that biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and mutually reinforce each other, and that neither will be successfully resolved unless both are tackled together. 

The report findings echo a recent communiqué by G7 leaders calling for greater and more coordinated climate and biodiversity action. 

Studies have shown that climate change is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss and that ecosystems and species play a major function in regulating climate, as carbon sinks, as well as enhancing adaptation and resilience to climate change. 

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