The Guardian

March 18, 2021
A key United Nations summit to negotiate an accord for nature similar to the Paris climate agreement has been postponed for a second time, it has been announced.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said in a statement that Cop15, the biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, had been moved to October due to delays related to the coronavirus pandemic. The negotiations in Kunming, China, had been scheduled for May after they were moved from October 2020.

Countries are expected to reach an agreement over targets to protect the natural world, including proposals to conserve 30% of the world’s oceans and land by 2030, introduce controls on invasive species and reduce plastics pollution.

Read More

WEF

March 18, 2021
2021 ought to be the “super year” for nature, where we collectively agree on how to deal with the greatest risk to humanity: we have become totally out of balance with nature. But there is a solution that is scientifically proven and cost-effective, and new research has found a way forward.

We’ve already lost 60% of terrestrial wildlife and 90% of the big ocean fish. Approximately 96% of all mammals on earth are humans and our domesticated livestock. Only 4% is everything else, from bears to elephants to tigers. We now risk the extinction of 1 million species during this century. Losing these species and all the goods and services they give us would mean the collapse of our life support system and everything we care about and need to survive: our food, our health, our economy, our security – everything.

Read More

BBC News

March 17, 2021
A global map compiled by international scientists pinpoints priority places for action to maximise benefits for people and nature.

Currently, only 7% of the ocean is protected.

A pledge to protect at least 30% by 2030 is gathering momentum ahead of this year's key UN biodiversity summit.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, sets a framework for prioritising areas of the ocean for protection.

The ocean covers 70% of the Earth, yet its importance for solving the challenges of our time has been overlooked, said study researcher Prof Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

"The benefits are clear," he said. "If we want to solve the three most pressing challenges of our century - biodiversity loss, climate change and food shortages - we must protect our ocean."

Read More

The New York Times

March 17, 2021
For the first time, scientists have calculated how much planet-warming carbon dioxide is released into the ocean by bottom trawling, the practice of dragging enormous nets along the ocean floor to catch shrimp, whiting, cod and other fish. The answer: As much as global aviation releases into the air.

While preliminary, that was one of the most surprising findings of a groundbreaking new study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The study offers what is essentially a peer-reviewed, interactive road map for how nations can confront the interconnected crises of climate change and wildlife collapse at sea.

It follows similar recent research focused on protecting land, all with a goal of informing a global agreement on biodiversity to be negotiated this autumn in Kunming, China.

Read More

Time Magazine

March 17, 2021
It’s been well established by now that the agricultural systems producing our food contribute at least one fifth of global anthropogenic carbon emissions—and up to a third if waste and transportation are factored in. A troubling new report points to a previously overlooked source: an industrial fishing process practiced by dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, China, and the E.U.

The study, published today in the scientific journal Nature, is the first to calculate the carbon cost of bottom trawling, in which fishing fleets drag immense weighted nets along the ocean floor, scraping up fish, shellfish and crustaceans along with significant portions of their habitats.

Read More

National Geographic

March 17, 2021
The campaign to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030, supported by more than 70 nations, is known mostly for soaring ambition and scant achievement so far. Just 7 percent of the seas are protected and only 2.7 percent are highly protected.

“It is very optimistic to think we’ll reach ‘30 by 30,’” says Patricia Majluf, a Peruvian fisheries scientist who has worked to create a deep-sea protected area off Peru in the face of strong resistance from the fishing industry. Peru has protected less than half a percent of its offshore waters. The proposed Nazca Ridge Marine Protected Area, on an undersea mountain range that stretches out into the Pacific from the Peru coast, is expected to be finalized this spring. It would boost Peru’s protected waters to 8 percent.

Read More

Nature

March 17, 2021
After a year of pandemic-induced delays, 2021 is set to be a big year for biodiversity, climate and the ocean. Later this year, world leaders are expected to gather for meetings of the United Nations conventions on biological diversity and climate to set future agendas. Ocean policies will be a priority for both.

Momentum is building for what is called the 30 × 30 campaign — a goal to protect 30% of the planet (both land and sea) by 2030. Last December, the 30% ocean goal was backed by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, which comprises the heads of state of 14 coastal nations, including some of the largest countries, such as Indonesia, and the smallest, like Palau. This is an important step.

Read More

CFN

March 17, 2021

A new study published in the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature today offers a combined solution to several of humanity’s most pressing challenges. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date of where strict ocean protection can contribute to a more abundant supply of healthy seafood and provide a cheap, natural solution to address climate change—in addition to protecting embattled species and habitats.

An international team of 26 authors identified specific areas that, if protected, would safeguard over 80% of the habitats for endangered marine species, and increase fishing catches by more than eight million metric tons. The study is also the first to quantify the potential release of carbon dioxide into the ocean from trawling, a widespread fishing practice—and finds that trawling is pumping hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ocean every year, a volume of emissions similar to those of aviation.

Read More

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.

Read More

Scientific American - OpEd

March 12, 2021
Representative Deb Haaland, who is expected to be sworn in as President Biden’s new secretary of the interior next week, already faces a pressing deadline. Under the wide-ranging executive order on climate change that Biden signed during his first full week in office, the interior secretary has until the end of April to recommend steps that the United States should take “to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”

The goal of protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030—known as “30 by 30”—is the latest iteration of a longstanding conservation pipe dream, but Biden is not the only world leader now taking it seriously. Thanks in part to a $1 billion campaign funded by Swiss medical technology entrepreneur Hansjörg Wyss and endorsed by the National Geographic Society and the Nature Conservancy, the 30 by 30 goal was formally adopted in January by the newly formed High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which includes more than 50 countries from six continents. The coalition members, led by the United Kingdom, Costa Rica and France, are urging their fellow signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity to embrace the target, too.

Read More

World Economic Forum - OpEd

March 11, 2021
Most MPAs seek to protect critical ocean habitats and species from one or more existential or predicted threats. The vast majority of such threats, such as pollution and exploitation of nature, are human induced. For an MPA to function effectively there must be science-based monitoring of progress, management of human activities and the environment, surveillance, and enforcement of rules and regulations put into place to abate the threat and protect species and ecosystems.

To do this at scale requires significant effort. Achieving 30 percent protection and conservation of the whole ocean—both coastal and high seas—requires that we protect and conserve 109 million square kilometres (42 million square miles), an area more than 11 times the size of the entire United States.

Read More

Thomson Reuters Foundation

March 11, 2021
Conservationists and environment officials hope new U.N. standards to measure the value of nature can help governments slow the rapid decline of plant and animal species worldwide.

Adopted this week by the U.N. Statistical Commission, the accounting system comes as a global movement gathers pace to protect the natural world by valuing the contributions forests, wetlands and other ecosystems make to economies and societies.

The benefits of preserving nature, such as reducing carbon emissions, producing water and boosting resilience to extreme weather, exceed the value of exploiting it, according to a study published this week in the Nature Sustainability journal.

If Nepal's Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park were turned from forest into farmland, for instance, instead of boosting the economy, it would create an $11-million annual deficit by cutting carbon storage 60% and water quality 88%, researchers estimated.

So how can the monetary value of nature be measured, and what does it mean for global efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss?

Read More

New York Times

March 11, 2021
With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.

But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.

Read More

European Commission

March 11, 2021
A new statistical framework to better account for biodiversity and ecosystems in national economic planning and policy decision-making, approved yesterday, allows countries worldwide to use a common set of rules and methods to track changes in ecosystems and their services. The European Commission supported the United Nations in the development of this framework with contributions from scientists, statisticians and policymakers. The new framework goes beyond the commonly used statistic of gross domestic product (GDP) and ensures that natural capital accounts—the contributions of forests, oceans and other ecosystems—complements existing economic accounts.

Read More

SciDev.Net

March 10, 2021
Biotechnology, indigenous knowledge, climate change and banana trees. This week, Africa Science Focus sits down with United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema to discuss biodiversity and environment on the continent.

With the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration officially launching in June, local solutions and innovations will play a leading role in driving sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mrema says.

Read More