Climate Home News

July 13, 2021
The UN biodiversity body has released the first draft of a global agreement to halt nature and wildlife loss in the next nine years.

The document will form the basis of negotiations ahead of a biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, where governments are due to agree on a post-2020 framework to protect life on Earth.

“This is meant to be both a summary of the current state of the discussion but also a way to elicit more discussion and negotiation,” Basil van Havre, co-chair of the open working group in charge of overseeing the negotiations at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity wrote on Twitter.

But while the draft text sets out aspirations and objectives for 2030 and beyond, it fails to provide a concrete action plan to meet them, campaigners say.

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The Guardian

July 12, 2021
Eliminating plastic pollution, reducing pesticide use by two-thirds, halving the rate of invasive species introduction and eliminating $500bn (£360bn) of harmful environmental government subsidies a year are among the targets in a new draft of a Paris-style UN agreement on biodiversity loss.

The goals set out by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)to help halt and reverse the ecological destruction of Earth by the end of the decade also include protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans and land and providing a third of climate crisis mitigation through nature by 2030.

The latest draft of the agreement, which follows gruelling virtual scientific and financial negotiations in May and June, will be scrutinised by governments before a key summit in the Chinese city of Kunming, where the final text will be negotiated.

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World Bank Blog

July 12, 2021
The rollout of vaccines globally, particularly as this effort picks up momentum, is spreading hope that countries will soon have control over the devastating health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries still, though, have a long path to travel for economic recovery. The pandemic has led to a deep global recession in which much economic activity has declined, including in the hard-hit tourism sector. In tourism-dependent economies in Africa and the Caribbean, for example, GDP is projected to shrink by 12 percent.

The economic toll is occurring at a time when biodiversity is imperiled, globally. The 2020 Living Planet Index reported a 68 percent average decline in birds, amphibians, mammals, fish, and reptiles since 1970; one-third of the world’s terrestrial, and two-thirds of its marine, protected areas are under threat from human impact. Protected areas are not only key to any global effort to conserve biodiversity, they are also crucial to address climate change and achieve sustainable development goals. Currently, 17 percent of land and 8 percent of the marine environment, world over, is protected. The proposed target for 2030 – to be negotiated at the CBD COP-15 in Kunming, China in the coming months -- is to expand this coverage to at least 30 percent, part of an effort to address the threat to biodiversity.

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Reuters

July 12, 2021
KUALA LUMPUR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Securing an ambitious new global pact to protect nature at a U.N. biodiversity summit later this year will require stronger political leadership from host nation China, officials and observers have warned.

About 195 countries are expected to agree the text of a new treaty to safeguard the planet’s plants, animals and ecosystems, similar to the Paris climate accord, at U.N. talks scheduled for October in the southern Chinese city of Kunming.

But the prospects of sealing a deal at the COP15 summit - already postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic - are dwindling unless in-person talks can happen, U.N. officials say.

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Campaign For Nature

July 12, 2021
Officials released today “Draft 1” of a global biodiversity framework--known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)--that includes three elements critical to addressing catastrophic biodiversity loss and the extinction crisis: a target to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030, a target to retain intact natural areas, and a commitment to respect Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ rights over their lands, territories and resources.

Nature is in a state of crisis, which poses a threat as serious as climate change to the future of humanity. Evidence shows that the ongoing and rapid loss of natural areas across the world poses a grave threat to the health and security of all living things.   

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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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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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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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Reuters

June 28, 2021
A growing global push to safeguard nature by pledging to protect about a third of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030 will fall short unless biodiversity-rich Southeast Asian nations get behind the ambitious proposal, environmentalists have warned.

Leaders of the G7 wealthy nations this month backed a coalition of about 60 countries that have already promised to conserve at least 30% of their land and oceans by 2030 (30x30) to curb climate change and the loss of plant and animal species.

Cambodia is the only Southeast Asian nation to have signed up to the goal so far, although it has been endorsed by countries in other parts of Asia-Pacific, including Japan, Pakistan and the Maldives.

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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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Reuters

June 28, 2021
A growing global push to safeguard nature by pledging to protect about a third of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030 will fall short unless biodiversity-rich Southeast Asian nations get behind the ambitious proposal, environmentalists have warned.

Leaders of the G7 wealthy nations this month backed a coalition of about 60 countries that have already promised to conserve at least 30% of their land and oceans by 2030 (30x30) to curb climate change and the loss of plant and animal species.

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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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