Project Syndicate

May 14, 2020
The Seychelles, a string of 115 verdant, rocky islands in the Indian Ocean, recently announced – in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic – that it would protect 30% of its glittering turquoise waters from commercial use.

Safeguarding some 410,000 square kilometers (158,000 square miles) of the sea will benefit wildlife on the shore and in the water, including 100,000 giant tortoises and some of the world’s last pristine coral reefs. But, beyond helping such species, establishing the new Marine Protected Areas – which was made possible through an innovative debt-swap deal – will also bolster the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of the Seychellois, who number under 100,000 but cater to more than 350,000 visitors each year.

Currently hosting only a handful of tourists stranded by the pandemic, the country is under a lockdown aimed at preventing the further spread of the virus. President Danny Faure’s decision to press ahead with this protection effort, even as his country deals with a public-health emergency, serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of nature to people’s physical and economic wellbeing – and not just in the Seychelles.

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New Strait Times- OpEd

May 11, 2020
While saving human lives and re-booting the economy are two utmost priorities for governments to consider when developing their post-Covid-19 Stimulus Package, they must not forget Nature.

After all, the root cause of those zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19 is the destruction of wildlife habitats, a fact endorsed by most of the scientific community. Meaning, our human activity facilitated the virus' jump from wildlife to us. And, as we contemplate the post-pandemic world to come, the voices of scientists need to be heard far and wide.

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Campaign for Nature

April 29, 2020
The Campaign for Nature welcomes the Chancellor's clear statement at the 11th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, in which she points out the close link between the biodiversity crisis and pandemics such as Covid-19.  According to scientists, 60 percent of all infectious diseases have been transmitted from animals to humans in recent decades. This is "particularly due to the increased use of previously undisturbed habitats and the resulting proximity to wild animals.” Merkel warns that progress must be made in the international protection of biodiversity and that a new framework for the protection of biodiversity is therefore necessary by next year's 15th UN Conference on the Implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

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Nature World News

April 23, 2020
A growing number of influential conservationists and scientists believe that the key to keeping the planet habitable is to protect half of the Earth. The rapid expansion of humans goes unabated, with the burning and bulldozing of nature, destruction of ecosystems, and the driving of species into extinction. 

Conservation biologist E.O. Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, with the idea of saving half the planet, since future extinction rates will be a thousand times higher than ever before.

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New Straits Times

April 22, 2020
Academy of Sciences Malaysia senior fellow Emeritus Professor Tan Sri Dr Zakri Abdul Hamid has been appointed ambassador and science adviser to the global Campaign for Nature, a partnership between the Wyss Campaign for Nature and the National Geographic Society.

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The Weather Network

April 22, 2020
Earth Day is celebrated each year on April 22 and this year marks the 50th anniversary since the campaign first launched. The event encourages increased awareness of the environment as well as actions and commitments that will reduce the negative impacts humans have on the planet.

Fighting climate change is central to Earth Day and some of the actions that the campaign recommends include using less electricity, taking public transit or walking instead of driving and other choices that reduce our carbon footprint. In addition to these individual behaviours, climate scientists say that more conservation efforts are needed to ensure that ecosystems can continue absorbing the large amount of carbon dioxide that we release.

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Medium

April 22, 2020
Across the United States, 20 million people of all ages and backgrounds united on April 22, 1970 to protect our planet and build an environmental movement from the ground up to chart a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable future. The people who lent their voices to the first Earth Day created a groundswell of political change that helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency and enact bedrock conservation laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Parents demanded change for their children, children demanded change for their future — and progress was won.

It was during this time that my father, former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, sounded the alarm about the creeping destruction of nature — what he termed ‘The Quiet Crisis.’

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Campaign For Nature

April 22, 2020
Today, as the world celebrates the 50th Earth Day, individuals and leaders around the world are reimagining our relationship with nature. There is a growing recognition that the accelerating destruction of nature is contributing to the major challenges of our time: climate change, mass wildlife extinction, and more clearly than ever this year, the spread of infectious diseases.

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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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Campaign For Nature

April 15, 2020
This week, finance ministers from the Group of Twenty (G20) and central bank governors are meeting to lay out an economic recovery plan to address the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on all countries, including the world’s poorest economies.

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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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The Independent

March 20, 2020
The novel coronavirus will not be the last pandemic to wreak havoc on humanity if we continue to ignore links between infectious diseases and destruction of the natural world, environmental experts have warned.

Dr Enric Sala, marine ecologist and part of National Geographic’s Campaign For Nature, told The Independent: “I’m absolutely sure that there are going to be more diseases like this in future if we continue with our practices of destroying the natural world, deforestation and capturing wild animals as pets or for food and medicine.”

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BBC

March 18, 2020
As humans continue to rapidly expand the scope of their domination of nature – bulldozing and burning down forests and other natural areas, wiping out species, and breaking down ecosystem functions – a growing number of influential scientists and conservationists think that protecting half of the planet in some form is going to be key to keeping it habitable.

The idea first received public attention in 2016 when E.O. Wilson, the legendary 90-year-old conservation biologist, published the idea in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. “We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along,” he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

Once thought of as aspirational, many are now taking these ideas seriously, not only as a firewall to protect biodiversity, but also to mitigate continued climate warming.

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The Africa Report

March 11, 2020
One year ago, when Cyclone Idai slammed into Mozambique, pummeling Beira with a 20-foot storm surge, very few people were prepared for the force and fury of that superstorm.

Thousands dead or missing nationwide. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops were damaged or destroyed. Millions impacted by flooding and ruined infrastructure. Billions of dollars in economic losses.

Gorongosa National Park was an island amidst this storm.

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Project Syndicate - OpEd

March 9, 2020
Natural systems are not just critical to the survival of the nine million plant and animal species with which we share this planet. They are also key to humanity's own future, which is increasingly being threatened by our failure to reduce carbon emissions and to protect the ecological foundations of life itself.

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