Global Citizen

December 2, 2021
Conservation is about protecting that which sustains life on Earth — the rivers that flow with fresh water, the soil rooting crops in place, the forests and marinescapes that release oxygen.

Framed in this way, conservation seems like an undertaking that would be universally supported. 

But conservationists face countless challenges, from the industrial forces invested in exploiting natural resources and polluting ecosystems to a general lack of funding and government support. Efforts to conserve an environment have long been framed by opponents as a threat to jobs and community well-being — as if any jobs or well-being would exist without a functioning environment.

This opposition appears to be fading as the climate and biodiversity crisis brings increasing devastation. Organizations are receiving waves of funding, and the voices of Indigenous people, who have long advocated for reciprocity with nature, are being elevated. The United Nations has deemed now until 2030 to be part of the Decade on Restoration, a globally coordinated effort to heal the planet. An increasing number of countries have pledged to protect 30% of land and marine spaces by 2030, and some corporations are beginning to transform their supply chains and operations.

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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 Guardian

September 9, 2020
Wildlife populations are in freefall around the world, driven by human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture, according to a major new assessment of the abundance of life on Earth.

On average, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s biennial Living Planet Report 2020. Two years ago, the figure stood at 60%.

The research is one of the most comprehensive assessments of global biodiversity available and was complied by 134 experts from around the world. It found that from the rainforests of central America to the Pacific Ocean, nature is being exploited and destroyed by humans on a scale never previously recorded.

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Common Dreams

July 9, 2020
The U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity warned Thursday of the "urgent action needed to save life on Earth" in response to a new global assessment revealing that nearly 27% of over 120,000 analyzed plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction.

"This assessment shows that one in four mammals are facing extinction, and although we don't prefer to think of ourselves as animals, we humans are mammals," Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at CBD, said in a statement. "We have to take bold and rapid action to reduce the huge damage we're doing to the planet if we're going to save whales, frogs, lemurs, and ultimately ourselves."

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The Guardian

May 5, 2020
From the vast plains of the Masai Mara in Kenya to the delicate corals of the Aldabra atoll in the Seychelles, conservation work to protect some of the world’s most important ecosystems is facing crisis following a collapse in ecotourism during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Organisations that depend on visitors to fund projects for critically endangered species and rare habitats could be forced to close, according to wildlife NGOs, after border closures and worldwide travel restrictions abruptly halted millions of pounds of income from tourism.

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Herald Live

April 20, 2020
We need to start creating a “new normal” that lets us live within nature and not at its expense.

That’s the call from the Algoa Bay branch of the Wildlife and Environment Society of SA (Wessa), which was responding on Sunday to recent statements by the World Economic Forum and heavyweight collective Campaign for Nature on the coronavirus and the G20’s post-pandemic restructuring plans.

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BBC

April 16, 2020
Conservation groups say nature must be a cornerstone of economic recovery plans for the sake of people, health and economies.

The call comes amid fears of a "spike in poaching" as rural communities lose vital income.

In Cambodia, 1% of the entire population of one critically endangered bird was wiped out in a single event.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said three of only a few hundred remaining giant ibis were poisoned.

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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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ZME Science

March 19, 2020
Farmlands can act as havens for wildlife species in a world where climate change is eroding their habitats, a new study explains. However, for that to happen, a shift needs to be made towards mixed cultures. Such a change would also make the farms themselves more resilient against climate changes, which would also benefit us and help solidify the global food supply against environmental shocks.

Although the study focused on bird species in Costa Rica, the team explains that birds can serve as a “natural guideline” for the health of other animal families throughout the world, as well.

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Phys.org

March 18, 2020
A bird study led by the Australian National University (ANU) provides new understanding of the ways birds and mammals respond to a rapidly warming world.

The researchers say the findings offer insights into the pressures wild populations must manage in order to survive. The future survival of animal populations will depend on how they are able to respond to climate change. As well as changing location or advancing the timing of breeding to track the warming seasons, some animals have been showing shifts in average body size.

Despite theoretical predictions that body size will decline as temperatures rise, some species have increased in size. To date, no study has been able to account for the variation in size trends.

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Mongabay

March 13, 2020
The World Health Organization has categorized the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a pandemic in light of its spread around the world. Ever since the first cases emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan last December, there’s been much speculation — and misinformation — about the origins of the virus. And while scientists suspect it may have come from a market in Wuhan when a diseased animal was consumed or butchered, spilling over into the human population from there, the issue is far from settled.

To give a better understanding of the origin of the coronavirus and what can be done to stop the future spread of disease from animals to humans, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Global Wildlife Conservation have partnered on a series of new infographics.

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The Hill - OpEd

March 7, 2020
The COVID-19 coronavirus has killed thousands of people around the world, including 14 in the U.S., and its origin in animals and global spread should remind us how inextricably linked we are with other life on Earth. We share the same planet and breathe the same air, and we also exchange microbes including germs. Now, with our burgeoning human population and global economy, we face new threats from a wider distribution of diseases like this new strain of coronavirus.

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BBC

February 20, 2020
Their 23-day survey counted 55 animals - a total that is unprecedented in the decades since commercial whaling ended. […]

To witness 55 of them now return to what was once a pre-eminent feeding ground for the population has been described as "truly, truly amazing" by cetacean specialist Dr Trevor Branch from the University of Washington, Seattle.

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ABC News

September 17, 2019
People widely support the conservation of wildlife, but lack an overall understanding of topics such as extinction due to lack of education, a new poll by National Geographic has found.

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