rfi

October 7, 2021
The fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) is scheduled to open in Kunming, China next Monday. The 5-day online meeting will adopt a global biodiversity protection action plan for the next ten years.

Affected by the new crown epidemic, the conference in Kunming has been postponed many times. The meeting was held at a time when all parties were preparing for the 26th meeting of the United Nations Climate Conference to be held in Glasgow next month. One of the two co-chairs of the convention working group, Basile van Havre, said in an online press conference on Wednesday. The opening of the conference next Monday will be an “important stage” in the negotiation of the convention. Beijing will also organize an online ministerial summit from October 12 to 13, when “98 ministers from 94 countries” will participate. A "Kunming Declaration" will be presented. Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention, expressed to AFP that he hopes that the declaration will further emphasize and recognize the importance of biodiversity to human health and the importance of political decision-making, and provide a basis for taking necessary global actions.

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NDTV

October 7, 2021
Just weeks before the crucial COP26 climate conference, another global UN summit -- this one tasked with reversing the destruction of nature -- officially kicks off next week in Kunming, China.

Focusing on biodiversity, COP15 is less well known than its sister climate summit but deals with issues that are no less vital to the health of the planet, such as fighting pollution, protecting ecosystems and preventing mass extinction.

The online session beginning on Monday will be followed by a face-to-face gathering in late April, where a final pact for nature will be hammered out.

Who is involved?

Discussions at the COP15 are grounded in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union -- but not the United States, the world's biggest historical polluter. Parties meet every two years.

The CBD was drafted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio. Its stated goals are to preserve the diversity of species on Earth and set guidelines on how to exploit natural resources sustainably and justly.

This year's gathering, originally set for 2020, was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Campaign For Nature

October 7, 2021
At a ceremony held between the French and Indian governments today, India officially joined the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, a group of more than 70 countries encouraging the adoption of the global goal to protect 30x30. 

HAC members currently include a mix of countries in the global north and south; European, Latin American, Africa and Asian countries are among the members.  India is the first of the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to join the HAC. 

India’s announcement comes in the leadup to a high-level biodiversity meeting, hosted by China. The virtual meeting to take place October 11-15 will tackle key aspects of the biodiversity treaty to be finalized in 2022.  The global 30x30 goal is currently a centerpiece of the treaty, known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. 

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The Conversation

October 7, 2021
We are currently facing a mass extinction of plants and animals. To remedy this, world leaders have pledged a huge expansion of protected areas ahead of the UN biodiversity summits to be held in October 2021 and May 2022 in Kunming, China.

The focus on how much of the planet to conserve overshadows questions of how nature should be conserved and by whom. In the past some conservation organisations have seen indigenous and local communities as undermining environmental conservation.

Our research strongly contradicts this. Our recent publication in Ecology and Society shows the best way to protect both nature and human wellbeing is for indigenous and local communities to be in control. That conclusion stems from examining examples of conservation projects carried out since 2000 and their results. Our international team of 17 scientists studied the effects on habitats and species and local communities.

We found improvements for conservation and people are much more likely when indigenous and local communities are environmental stewards. When in charge, local communities can establish a shared vision for conserving the environments they live in and for coexisting with wildlife. 

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The Guardian

October 5, 2021
Governments hoping for a global agreement to halt biodiversity loss must put more effort into access to Covid-19 vaccines for developing countries, the UN’s biodiversity chief has warned.

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said the Kunming Cop15 summit, at which governments will try to forge a “Paris agreement for nature”, was vital for halting the global crisis of species loss.

Arrangements are being made to enable all delegates to be vaccinated in good time for the in-person part of the conference in April next year. But by that stage there must also be a clear plan for making vaccines available to the populations of developing countries, said Mrema.

“If we are to continue with negotiations, ensuring that no one is left behind, it means parties can’t meet in person if the whole world is not vaccinated,” she told the Guardian. “In the developing world, vaccines are still not easily available to the rest of the population, and that’s a challenge and a worry. We need to vaccinate more broadly, not just for delegates. Otherwise the principle of leaving no one behind will be the opposite – we will have left many behind.”

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The New York Times

October 4, 2021
The world lost about 14 percent of its coral reefs in the decade after 2009, mainly because of climate change, according to a sweeping international report on the state of the world’s corals.

The report, issued late Monday, underscores the catastrophic consequences of global warming while also offering some hope that some coral reefs can be saved if humans move quickly to rein in greenhouse gases.

“Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong,” said David Obura, one of the report’s editors and chairman of the coral specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The 14 percent decline, he said, was cause for deep concern. “In finance, we worry about half-percent declines and half-percent changes in employment and interest rates.”

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The New York Times [Opinion]

September 30, 2021
Twin crises afflict the natural world. The first is climate change. Its causes and potentially catastrophic consequences are well known. The second crisis has received much less attention and is less understood but still requires urgent attention by global policymakers. It is the collapse of biodiversity, the sum of all things living on the planet.

As species disappear and the complex relationships between living things and systems become frayed and broken, the growing damage to the world’s biodiversity presents dire risks to human societies.

The extinction of plants and animals is accelerating, moving an estimated 1,000 times faster than natural rates before humans emerged. Bugs on our windshields are no longer a summer thing as insect populations plummet. Nearly three billion birds have been lost in North America since 1970, diminishing the pollination of food crops. In India, thousands of people are dying of rabies because the population of vultures that feed on garbage is cratering, resulting in a huge increase in feral dogs that eat these food scraps in the birds’ absence.

This past week, federal wildlife officials, as if underscoring the point, recommended that 22 animals and one plant be declared extinct. They include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish and a bat.

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The Straits Times

September 29, 2021
Nature is not, and cannot be, a passive victim of economic development, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Wednesday (Sept 29).

Not only does nature help make city life more liveable, it can also contribute to mankind's fight against climate change, he said, urging delegates gathered at the Ecosperity Week sustainability conference to take a fresh perspective on the natural environment.

The three-day conference is convened by Singapore's Temasek investment company for policymakers, investors, non-government groups and businesses, and is being held in a hybrid format with some attendees gathered at Marina Bay Sands. Wednesday marks the second day of the conference.

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The Guardian

September 29, 2021
When their time comes, many of the richest people on Earth have committed to giving away the bulk of their fortunes. Education, poverty and the arts have traditionally benefited from philanthropy, attracting billions for important causes. But increasingly, nature and the climate crisis have become a focus of giving.

Last week, a group of nine philanthropic foundations made the largest ever donation to nature conservation, pledging $5bn to finance the protection of 30% of land and sea by the end of the decade. Swiss businessman Hansjörg Wyss, also a major donor to the US Democratic party, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were among the billionaires behind the Protecting our Planet challenge. In effect, the money covers the estimated cost of the 30% goal for this decade, one of the 21 targets included in the draft Paris-style UN agreement for nature currently being negotiated. It also includes plans to eliminate plastics pollution and reduce pesticide use to slow species extinctions.

“We can solve the crisis facing nature,” Wyss said at the launch. “But it’s going to take the wealthiest nations and the wealthiest individuals committing to reinvest our enormous bounties here on Earth, safeguarding nature and protecting our lands, waters and wildlife.”

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Antara News

September 28, 2021
Historic announcement follows ASEAN member states' calls for more funding for global biodiversity agreement

At a high-level event in the margins of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, nine philanthropic organizations launched the "Protecting Our Planet Challenge" and pledged $5 billion to protect and conserve 30% of the planet by 2030 by supporting protected areas and Indigenous stewardship of their territories. This marks the largest-ever philanthropic commitment to nature conservation.

The science based 30x30 target has emerged as a central element of the Convention on Biological Diversity's draft 10-year strategy, which is expected to be approved at COP15 in Kunming, China in April 2022. Indigenous leaders welcomed the announcements as a sign of how the 30x30 target could be aligned with human rights.

Throughout the Convention on Biological Diversity negotiations, ASEAN member states have raised the important topic of biodiversity finance. A landmark study found that current global spending on biodiversity needs to increase by more than a factor of five in order to protect the most important biodiversity around the world.

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The China Environment News

September 26, 2021
According to China Environment News: The 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15) will be held in October, 2021, at which representatives from governments, enterprises, NGOs, media and other organizations around the world will gather in Kunming to discuss around the theme of "Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth" and release the "Kunming Declaration". As one of the eight parallel forums of CBD COP15, the NGO Parallel Forum will be held in Kunming from 27 to 28 September 2021. During the forum, All-China Environment Federation (ACEF) will host the theme forum "Environmental NGOs' Role in Biodiversity Mainstreaming" in joint with International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN).

This forum will invite NGOs from different countries in fields of ecological protection, climate change, sustainable consumption, and pollution prevention and control etc. to exchange and form concerted efforts on biodiversity conservation mainstreaming. Practical experiences and outstanding cases will be shared and the "Environmental NGOs' Joint Statement on Biodiversity Conservation Mainstreaming" will also be released by the end of the forum. Relevant institutions such as the government, private sectors, think tanks, and media will also be invited from the perspective of multi-stakeholders. Through incorporating the UN SDGs, all the attendees are expected to discuss and figure out both the opportunities and the challenges for future cooperation on mainstreaming biodiversity conservation as well as building a dialogue and collaboration platform for NGOs and multi-stakeholders.

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E&E News Greenwire

September 24, 2021
Americans have been draining wetlands for farming and development since Colonial times.

But climate change may reverse that tide — from destruction to restoration.

Federal scientists are studying whether heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in restored salt marshes, sea grass beds and mangrove swamps. And those wetlands can in turn protect communities along the coast from rising seas and fierce, frequent climate-driven storms.

“The concept that’s forming is that what we need to do is massive-scale ecosystem restoration as soon as possible to begin absorbing as much carbon dioxide as we can and diminish the amount of overshoot that we have in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,” said Kevin Kroeger, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.

Across the Lower 48 states, wetlands hold at least 3.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate — roughly half the country’s net total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

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Associated Press

September 23, 2021
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced plans Thursday to spend more than $900 million over the next five years to curb global malnutrition, a move to stem the rise in world hunger during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s one of several pledges private donors made this week as world leaders gather in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly.

On Wednesday, a coalition of nine foundations said they would collectively spend $5 billion by 2030 to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea, known as 30x30. The pledge from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Washington D.C.-based Wyss Foundation and others is believed to be the largest private pledge to protect biodiversity.

One of the donors, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had already announced on Monday his Bezos Earth Fund would earmark $1 billion to aid with conservation efforts. That commitment is part of the $10 billion Bezos pledged last year to fight climate change following years of criticism about Amazon’s carbon footprint. He stepped down from the company in July.

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Asia News International

September 23, 2021
Nine organisations have pledged 5 billion US dollars over the next ten years to support the creation, expansion, management and monitoring of protected and conserved areas of land, inland water and sea, working with indigenous peoples, local communities, civil society and governments, the United Nations said.

Heads of State, philanthropic leaders and indigenous representatives came together on Wednesday to announce unprecedented commitments to protect and restore nature at the opening session of the Nature for Life Hub, a high-level event Transformative Action for Nature and People, coinciding with the 76th United Nations General Assembly, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

“This is not a moment where we should not have hope. At the centre of all this, people will have to be the ones who shape what happens next,” Achim Steiner UNDP Administrator said here in a statement.

“Societies have found within themselves the ability to address things that often were long overdue whether it was the issues of inequality or exclusion, but also investments in systematic transformations. We are investing in one another’s ability to, together, change the trajectory of the world,” he added.

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African Arguments

September 23, 2021
Earlier this week, nine philanthropic organisations launched the “Protecting Our Planet Challenge” and pledged $5 billion to protect and conserve 30% of the planet by 2030 (30×30). This can be achieved by supporting protected areas and indigenous stewardship of their territories. This marks the largest-ever philanthropic commitment to nature conservation.

Whilst this may not naturally lead you to consider the implications for peace and security, this type of financial commitment could play an important role in the global effort to bring peace, prosperity and sustainability to the continent of Africa.

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