New Straits Times

September 5, 2021
Borneo, the world's third largest island, boasts one of Earth's oldest rainforests.

It accounts for just one per cent of the planet's landmass yet holds approximately six per cent of the Earth's variety of plant and animal species, including such charismatic creatures as Bornean orangutans, clouded leopards, pygmy elephants and rhinoceros, as well as giant pitcher plants and Rafflesia flowers.

Forest conversion and degradation over the years have threatened the integrity of rainforests. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) listed Borneo among the deforestation hotspots and planetary warming has made it vulnerable to forest fires.

It was to the great credit of the governments of Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia when they established the "Heart of Borneo" (HoB) conservation area in 2007, one of the largest transboundary rainforests in the world — 22 million ha (the size of England and Scotland combined). It was a triumph of environmental diplomacy and a demonstration of political will at the highest level.

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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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Campaign For Nature

August 24, 2021

Africa’s prosperity depends on preserving its vast natural wealth, yet the continent’s natural capital stocks are dwindling rapidly, concludes a new report released today by the German government.  

The report, one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of the strong links between Africa’s development and nature protection, is the latest study to lay out evidence that economic recovery and nature protection are closely intertwined. It emphasizes that investing in nature is a critical development strategy, with benefits that are 8-9 times the costs.

Written by a team of researchers from Germany, Morocco, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Côte d’Ivoire, the study shows that the continent’s most important economic sectors--including agriculture, fishing, tourism and hydropower--will thrive if nature is protected. The study also points to the critical role nature plays in building resilience against the impacts of climate change, including natural hazards and disasters.   

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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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Reuters

July 7, 2021
China has designated 25% of its onshore territory "ecological conservation" areas, limiting development and human activities in order to improve the environment and conserve resources.

The Ministry of Ecology and Environment was tasked with identifying areas in need of protection a decade ago, when the government acknowledged that decades of "irrational development" had put its ecological safety under severe strain.

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Reuters

The global economy faces annual losses of $2.7 trillion by 2030 if ecological tipping points are reached and countries fail to invest more in protecting and restoring nature, the World Bank said on Thursday, calling for a greener COVID-19 recovery.

In its first “Economic Case for Nature” report, the bank looked at how many economies rely on biodiversity and how they would cope if certain services provided by nature collapsed. It found that sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia would be worst hit.

The study identified key “ecosystem services” that it said were close to tipping points, including wild pollinators and provision of food from marine fisheries and timber from native forests.

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Campaign For Nature

July 1, 2021
A  World Bank report released today argues that policies safeguarding nature deliver a long list of valuable benefits, including pollination, food provision and timber from native forests, that deliver a win-win for biodiversity and economies. The Economic Case for Nature finds that if the world fails to protect nature, we could lose $2.7 trillion in global GDP annually, with countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia particularly hard hit.  

Building off recent reports laying out the economic benefits of protecting nature and following a major proclamation by G7 nations that protecting nature is an urgent priority, the report uses a first-of-its-kind analysis to reveal the extent to which valuing and protecting nature is a key development issue.

It makes the case that nature-smart policies that preserve ecosystem service benefits would increase global GDP by $50-150 billion compared to business as usual and reduce the risk of ecosystem collapse and an associated potential reduction in GDP of 2.3%. Other reports have highlighted additional benefits of protecting nature, including the expansion of nature-based tourism, which is an important source of economic growth in many developing countries. 

The report notes that ambitious targets, like the global effort to protect 30% of land and ocean by 2030, are achievable and play a crucial role in unlocking these benefits.  

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Aljazeera - OpEd

June 2, 2021
Humanity faces a herculean task to reverse climate change and protect the natural world that supports us. We must retool human society to live in harmony with nature – all while leaving space for people in developing nations to prosper and grow.

We want this to happen immediately. But we must be realistic. Even if everyone starts immediately to turn their promises on climate change and nature loss into action – as they should and must – we are looking at decades of work.

To buy time to complete these transformations, particularly the transition to zero-carbon economies, we need fast-acting and simple solutions. Solutions that slow climate change, restore nature and biodiversity, protect us against pandemics, allow us to produce more food, create jobs, reduce inequalities, build peace.

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Vox

May 20, 2021
As President Joe Biden moves quickly to reinstate the full slate of environmental policies weakened by former President Donald Trump, including the landmark Migratory Bird Treaty Act, he’s signaling that climate change and biodiversity loss are now major priorities for the US.

Earlier this month, the Interior Department also launched a campaign to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030, joining more than 50 other countries that have committed to that goal. Biden is pursuing the target, known as 30 by 30, alongside a new and more ambitious commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet there’s one big problem with this post-Trump environmental renaissance: The US still hasn’t joined the most important international agreement to conserve biodiversity, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). And it isn’t just a small, inconsequential treaty. Designed to protect species, ecosystems, and genetic diversity, the treaty has been ratified by every other country or territory aside from the Holy See. Among other achievements, CBD has pushed countries to create national biodiversity strategies and to expand their networks of protected areas.

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Mongabay

May 7, 2021
The world is brimming with bad news about people failing to take care of the Earth. But there is a way to change the narrative, says Canadian conservationist Harvey Locke. The key, according to him, is to strive for a “nature positive” world that is less about destruction and more about restoration.

“We know we’re on a rocket sled into the abyss, and we need to turn that around 100%, going the other direction on a rocket sled towards a positive solution,” Locke told Mongabay in an interview. “Tinkering is not possible. We can’t just [take] an old crystal radio set where you just kind of turn the dial a little bit [to] move from one station to another. It won’t work. We need to be on the internet, instead of listening to the radio — that kind of level of change.”

Locke is the lead author of a new paper published April 30, a few days before the start of a six-week virtual meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), an intergovernmental scientific advisory body to the parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At this meeting, the SBSTTA will provide advice on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, Guido Broekhoven, head of policy research and development at WWF, told Mongabay in an interview.

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CNN

March 24, 2021
"It is a sad thing to think that nature speaks and that mankind does not listen." This remark, made in 1870 by the poet and novelist Victor Hugo, is even more relevant today. At a time when biodiversity -- the fragile web of life of which we are all a part -- threatens to disintegrate, we must not forget that we are, in many respects, the authors of our own misfortune.

Intersecting and escalating crises -- climate disruption, the collapse of biodiversity, the declining health of the ocean and the depletion of natural resources -- clearly demonstrate that we cannot continue on our current path. Our relationship with nature, traditionally based on domination and exploitation, has already altered some 75% of the land's surface and 40% of the marine environment. The global rate of species extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years, and around 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This cannot continue.

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Campaign For Nature

March 22, 2021

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a new report that--for the first time--provides conclusive evidence that investments in renewable energy and biodiversity conservation do more to boost a country’s GDP than investments in fossil fuels and activities that destroy ecosystems. The findings laid out in the IMF Working Paper, Building Back Better: How Big Are Green Spending Multipliers?, are based on a new international dataset that is the first to gather and compare the impacts on GDP of spending on green and non-eco-friendly energy and land use.

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Campaign For Nature

March 15, 2021
Secretary Haaland has been at the forefront of efforts to conserve at least 30 percent of the land and ocean in the United States by 2030. Prior to her nomination, Sec. Haaland was the lead sponsor of a resolution supporting the 30x30 goal and served as an honorary member of the Campaign for Nature’s Global Steering Committee, which advocates for the 30x30 target at the global level.

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UNEP

March 10, 2021
One year from the onset of the pandemic, recovery spending has fallen short of nations’ commitments to build back more sustainably. An analysis of spending by leading economies, led by Oxford’s Economic Recovery Project and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), finds only 18.0% of announced recovery spending can be considered ‘green.’

The report, Are We Building Back Better? Evidence from 2020 and Pathways for Inclusive Green Recovery Spending, calls for governments to invest more sustainably and tackle inequalities as they stimulate growth in the wake of the devastation wrought by the pandemic.

The most comprehensive analysis of COVID-19-related fiscal rescue and recovery efforts by 50 leading economies so far, the report reveals that only $368bn of $14.6tn COVID-induced spending (rescue and recovery) in 2020 was green.

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PhysOrg

March 8, 2021
The economic benefits of conserving or restoring natural sites "outweigh" the profit potential of converting them for intensive human use, according to the largest-ever study comparing the value of protecting nature at particular locations with that of exploiting it.

A research team led by the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) analysed dozens of sites—from Kenya to Fiji and China to the UK—across six continents. A previous breakthrough study in 2002 only had information for five sites.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, come just weeks after a landmark report by Cambridge Professor Partha Dasgupta called for the value of biodiversity to be placed at the heart of global economics.

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