National Geographic

April 10, 2020
[…] As top predators, harpy eagles play a crucial ecological role, keeping populations of prey species in check; their presence in a forest is indicative of a healthy, functioning environment. No one knows how many remain in the wild, but scientists do know that they’re disappearing. The giant raptors once lived from southern Mexico to northern Argentina, but since the 19th century their range has declined by nearly half, leaving the Amazon with 93 percent of the species’ remaining occupied habitat. Deforestation—the primary threat to harpy eagles’ survival—shows no signs of slowing. Last year, the world watched as massive tracts of the Amazon went up in flames, and right now 45 acres of Brazilian Amazon are being razed every hour.

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edie

April 8, 2020
Pernod Ricard's vice president of global sustainability Vanessa Wright discusses the company's approach to regenerative agriculture and biodiversity and why more people will be focusing on natural climate solutions moving forward.

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CNN

April 7, 2020
Australia's Great Barrier Reef has experienced its most widespread bleaching event on record, with the south of the reef bleaching extensively for the first time, a new survey has found.

This marks the third mass bleaching event on the reef in just the last five years and scientists say that the rapid warming of the planet due to human emissions of heat-trapping gases are to blame.

Aerial analysis conducted by Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, and others from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, found that coastal reefs along the entire length of the iconic reef -- a stretch of about 1,500 miles (2,300 kilometers) from the Torres Strait in the north, right down to the reef's southern boundary -- have been severely bleached.

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The Hill

April 6, 2020
The United Nations's acting head of biodiversity is calling for a global prohibition of so-called wet markets where live and dead wild animals are kept in cages and sold for human consumption. 

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, told The Guardian in an interview published Monday that “the message we are getting is if we don’t take care of nature, it will take care of us." 

The comments came as officials around the world ramp up their calls for countries such as China to crack down on wildlife markets that are believed to play a leading role in the spread of infectious diseases.

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African Arguments

April 6, 2020
The rapid rise of disease caused by a new coronavirus seems to have caught much of the world by surprise. It shouldn’t have. An upsurge in the emergence of new infectious diseases started at least 30 years before this virus appeared. Some of these diseases have been transmitted from wild animals to humans, and the spread of COVID-19 appears to have originated in a market selling dead and living wildlife, including some endangered species. Research also shows that many of the most serious outbreaks – including Ebola, and the Zika and Nipah viruses – have been linked to biodiversity loss, and to deforestation in particular.

Both of us governed nations in West Africa through the Ebola crisis of 2014-2016. We served at the helm of the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries hit hardest by that crisis which sickened more than 28,600 people and killed more than 11,300. The epidemic also cost our region an estimated $53 billion. Our health systems and economies are still recovering.

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The Washington Post

April 4, 2020
[…] In the current crisis, the news of people flocking to parks and preserves in Illinois and around the country and the world — even, sadly, as more of those open spaces are being shut daily — seems completely logical. Nature offers balm to wounded hearts, peace to troubled thoughts, light and life that outshine the darkness and gloom of the daily news. Just this week, I received a message from a good friend in China including photographs of Japanese waxwings, an elegant bird species. She told me what joy they brought her. Another friend, this one local, sent a photo of a crayfish he had found with scores of tiny offspring on its belly. Many others have shared such natural discoveries.

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C-Span

April 4, 2020
Matt Lee-Ashley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, discussed how threats to global biodiversity have potentially contributed to the coronavirus pandemic.

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CNN

April 2, 2020
Marine life in the world's oceans could recover to healthy levels in the next thirty years if decisive and urgent action is taken, an international review has found.

A team of scientists from around the world found marine life to be "remarkably resilient" despite damage caused by human activity and interference, they said in a review published Wednesday in science journal Nature.

Researchers said ocean populations could be restored as soon as 2050, but warned that there is limited time to achieve this change.

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Euronews

April 1, 2020

Scientists estimate that roughly one million land and marine species may become extinct in the foreseeable future. Many within decades.

What are the main reasons for the decline of underwater ecosystems?

Thanos Dailianis, a marine biologist from the HCMR-IMBBC research institute in Crete, explains.

“Marine ecosystems are threatened both locally and globally. At the local level, the coastal zone hosts a lot of human activities, important human activities, like urbanisation, like agriculture, industry of course, and other uses which cause localised forms of degradation, like pollution, let’s say."

"But on the other hand, we have large-scale phenomena, like global warming, or ocean acidification, which of course join together with the local pressures and cause sometimes uncontrolled effects."

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Mongabay

April 1, 2020

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) pandemic, believed to have been triggered by the transmission of the virus from animals to humans, has brought into sharp focus zoonotic diseases that are spread by animals forced to move out of their natural habitats that are increasingly being destroyed, say experts.

Destruction of forests for growing crops, urban expansion and building road networks and a parallel intensification of wildlife trade has resulted in ecological conditions and movement of wild animals, which are reservoirs of some viruses or bacteria, towards human settlements. This, in turn, results in the emergence of new pathogens, they say.

The COVID-19 pandemic “is likely a global effect of natural habitat destruction combined with the effects of globalisation,” says Maria Cristina Rulli, professor at the department of civil and environmental engineering at Politecnico di Milano, who has worked extensively on the links between Ebola virus disease outbreaks and forest destruction in Africa.

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Forbes

March 30, 2020

Pictures of clean Venice canals, dolphins in Cagliari and swans in Milan were all around the internet last week and - many argued - were signs of nature healing itself when people are not around. While air is undoubtedly less polluted because of a drop in greenhouse gases’ emissions, the impact of self-isolation on the environment is less than thought.

In fact, nature has been healing long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced most people at home and it will continue to do so with the help of good policies.

“It’s a result of a longer trend, because, if those species were declining, they wouldn’t show up even during the coronavirus lockdown,” Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe, explained to Forbes.com. “We have to be very careful when we make those connections, although it may be very attractive to draw a conclusion. But of course, animals will behave differently when everything is quiet and they will show up more easily close to cities and villages.”

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The Conversation

March 30, 2020

A little more than a year ago, the Haida Nation released the Land-Sea-People plan to manage Gwaii Haanas, off the coast of northern British Columbia, “from mountaintop to seafloor as a single, interconnected ecosystem.”

It’s an innovative conservation effort that demonstrates how the Haida Nation and Canada’s federal government can achieve biodiversity targets, protect the rights of Indigenous people and encourage collaboration among communities, governments and society. And it’s an example of what we need more of to meet conservation objectives in the coming decade.

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New Strait Times - OpEd

March 25, 2020
As the global Covid-19 crisis dramatically underlines, the fate and wellbeing of people relies on the health of the planet. Planetary health is a term referring to human health “and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”.

The novel coronavirus looks increasingly like an expression of our failure to understand this link, as demonstrated by our disruption of ecosystems. It was in 1980 that non-governmental organisation (NGO) Friends of the Earth first articulated the need to enlarge the World Health Organisation’s definition of health, asserting that “personal health involves planetary health”. 

The next decade, the late Norwegian physician Per Fugelli warned: “The patient Earth is sick. Global environmental disruptions can have serious consequences on human health. It’s time for doctors to give a world diagnosis and advice on treatment.”

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Financial Review

March 24, 2020

As the COVID-19 catastrophe has unfolded, a significant broadening of the landholdings of Indigenous Australians has taken place, with about 88,000 hectares of beautiful, rich Murrumbidgee floodplain country in south-western NSW handed back to its traditional custodians, the Nari-Nari people.

No figure for the value of the land has been given by Nature Conservancy, which facilitated the complex sale and handover process with the NSW government. However, an earlier federal estimate put it at $44 million.

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SDG Knowledge Hub

March 23, 2020

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, on 23 March 2020, CBD Acting Executive Secretary Elizabeth Mrema announced that the dates for this meeting would be adjusted. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place from 15-28 October 2020. 

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