NRDC
December 2, 2019
Protecting and restoring natural areas in Latin America, home to fifty percent of the planet’s biodiversity and over a quarter of its forests, is critical if the world is to avert a biodiversity and climate disaster.
edie
November 20, 2019
Gucci chief executive Marco Bizzarri has called on business leaders to sign up to a Carbon Neutral Challenge that sees businesses deliver greenhouse gas emissions reductions across their entire value chain in order to achieve net-zero emissions.
Mongabay
November 14, 2019
As the world races to meet the goal of protecting 17 percent of Earth’s land surface, a new study looks at how effective protected areas are at reducing human pressures — and finds that there is considerable room for improvement.
National Geographic
November 12, 2019
The headquarters at Zakouma National Park, in southeastern Chad, is a sand-colored structure with a crenellated parapet that gives it the look of an old desert fortress. Outside the door to the central control room on the second floor hangs an image of a Kalashnikov rifle, circled in red, with a slash: No weapons allowed inside. Kalashnikovs are ubiquitous in Zakouma. All the rangers carry them. So do the intruders who come to kill wildlife.
Phys.org
November 8, 2019
[…] More than 600 indigenous communities live in Canada's boreal forest, one of the last great swaths of intact wilderness on Earth. But every year, a million acres fall to logging to make timber and tissue products, including toilet paper sold in the U.S., according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That's seven hockey rinks' worth of forest every minute.
Canada's First Nations, with help from groups such as the NRDC and Greenpeace, want to stanch the losses and protect the lands their ancestors have depended upon for centuries—or longer.
UN Environment Programme
November 8, 2019
It is well known that peatlands matter for livelihoods, carbon storage, flood mitigation, and water quality, but a recent study has shown that peatlands also matter for human health.
The study suggests that thousands of deaths could be prevented over the next three decades across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore through improved land management to reduce the number and extent of peatland fires. The fires contribute to dangerous levels of particulate matter harmful to human health. Air quality near large population centres could improve significantly, saving lives, the study found.
Project Syndicate —Op-Ed
November 7, 2019
The 2015 Paris climate agreement was made possible when countries realized it was in their own interest to commit to reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. But a similar understanding of the need for stronger conservation policies has yet to take hold, putting the world's ecosystems increasingly at risk.
Vox
November 6, 2019
A group of 27 countries met in Paris this month to raise $9.8 billion for the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations program that routes money from wealthier countries to poorer ones to combat climate change.
But climate activists said it was a disappointing haul for a program critical to meeting the goals of the Paris climate accord — where countries agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, with an aspirational limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Phys.org
October 31, 2019
Brazil contains the largest expanse of tropical ecosystems within protected areas, but a significant proportion of these reserves may be vulnerable to the effects of ongoing global climate change, according to a study published in the journal Conservation Biology.
The Nature Conservancy
October 31, 2019
[…] how we view our relationship with land and sea could be make-or-break for our civilisation and also help determine the fate of every other creature on Earth. The world is suffering massive ecosystem degradation, unprecedented wildlife decline and extinctions—all of this in the face of possible runaway climate change.
Governments and businesses now have an opportunity to take a critical, collective step to arrest this decline: to agree to protect at least 30 percent of the world on land and sea.
Xinhuanet
October 31, 2019
China will step up efforts to establish and optimize the system for natural protected areas, said a forestry official.
The system would include a series of policies and mechanisms, such as ecological compensation and transfer payments, said Li Chunliang, deputy head of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration at the first World Forum on Nature Conservation.
Reuters
October 29, 2019
Expanding the planet’s protected natural areas to safeguard vanishing forests and other ecosystems, and the species they protect, is unlikely to be effective on its own as human encroachment into reserves grows, scientists warned Tuesday.
[…]
Both chronic underfunding of efforts to protect the land, and a lack of engagement with local communities that live there are hurting conservation efforts, they found.
Climate Home News
October 2, 2019
Last week, UN chief António Guterres gathered the world’s political, business and civil society leaders in New York in an effort to jump start action on climate change.
[…]
CHN is publishing this (non-exhaustive) list of initiatives, promises and goals with a view toward accountability.
Boston Globe - OpEd
October 1, 2019
Anyone paying attention to world events could hardly help but feel despair about increasing climate chaos and social inequality, plummeting wildlife populations and political strife.
But in my role as the UN Patron of Protected Areas and as president of Tompkins Conservation, I’ve seen firsthand a reason for hope: Committed people working together can help nature heal — can help “rewild” degraded places, restore the conditions that support abundant wildlife, and foster beauty.
Campaign For Nature
September 27, 2019
Protecting diverse ecosystems and the natural benefits that they provide is essential to the future of life on our planet and the well-being of humanity.
Those services, which are often called ecosystem services, include providing resources such as food and water, maintaining habitats that support biodiversity, offering opportunities for recreation, and helping to regulate human-caused impacts like climate change.