Reuters

December 12, 2020
Five years ago, when the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change was adopted, storing planet-warming carbon in ecosystems such as tropical forests, wetlands and coastal mangroves was not seen as a major part of the solution.

Now officials and environmentalists say goals to limit global temperature rise cannot be met without nature’s help.

Ahead of a U.N. “Climate Ambition Summit” to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord on Saturday, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they said threats to plants, wildlife, human health and the climate should be confronted together.

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Campaign for Nature

December 11, 2020
On the 5th anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement, Nature Based Solutions are emerging as  essential climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. In 2015, the biodiversity agenda and the climate agenda were seen as two separate tracks.  It is now widely believed that protecting ecosystems could provide at least a third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030 under the Paris Climate Agreement. In the wake of Covid 19 and the growing understanding of the interdependence of biodiversity, climate and human health and their compound threat, it has become clear that the natural world should be included in climate solutions, and that global leaders should address all three crises in an integrated manner. 

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Campaign For Nature

December 2, 2020
Today, the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), composed of 14 serving world leaders, is putting forward a new ocean action agenda for building a sustainable ocean economy where protection, production and prosperity go hand in hand. In addition to releasing commitments and policy actions designed to transform how the world can protect and use the ocean and ultimately sustainably manage humanity’s impacts on it, the Ocean Panel will also release a new comprehensive report spotlighting ways to accelerate, scale and finance ocean action. 

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New Straits Times

November 15, 2020
Actions speak louder than words. Three recent events have left this observer feeling more optimistic about the environment in this country.

Firstly, the 2021 Budget. The finance minister last week listed a number of environment-friendly measures, including RM50 million to remove rubbish and waste from rivers; RM40 million to strengthen enforcement and monitoring; RM10 million for island waste management projects in Johor and Terengganu; RM400 million for the preservation of natural resources (the Tahap initiative); RM20 million to hire 500 former soldiers and police, as well as Orang Asli, to patrol forests; and a promise to build with the private sector an urban transformation centre in Lembah Pantai.

Secondly, Pakatan Harapan and Barisan Nasional assemblymen in the Selangor Legislative Assembly last week stood as one to vote to preserve forest reserves in Selangor, after the speaker called for a voice vote to consider that "any move to degazette forest reserves should only be done in consultation with residents, stakeholders and professionals".

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Independent

October 30, 2020
The world must tackle the biodiversity and climate crises to stand a chance of preventing future pandemics, the world's leading experts on nature are warning.

That includes setting up an international body of leaders to minimise risks, the scientists say.

Where there is a clear link to high pandemic risk, taxes on meat consumption and production should be considered, and incentives should be provided to switch away from high-risk industries such as fur farming, they suggest.

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Mongabay

October 30, 2020
Avoiding the loss of human life and the economic fallout caused by future pandemics will require a seismic change in our approach to the causes of the emergence of disease-causing viruses, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES.

Peter Daszak, who chaired the July 2020 workshop that produced the report, noted that we’ve identified only about 2,000 of the 1.7 million viruses that exist in birds and mammals. Scientists estimate that between 540,000 and 850,000 of these could infect humans.

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National Geographic

October 29, 2020
Absent major policy changes and billions of dollars invested in protecting land and wildlife, the world may see another major pandemic like COVID-19, an international group of scientists warned today.

Conserving biodiversity can preserve human lives, according to their new report, which reviews the latest research on how the decline of habitat and wildlife leaves humans exposed to new, emerging diseases.

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Campaign For Nature

October 29, 2020

Today, leaders from 190 countries were scheduled to gather in Kunming, China for final negotiations on a biodiversity treaty designed to address the world’s urgent extinction crises. Instead, these leaders are at home, battling the spread of a zoonotic disease that likely emerged from deforestation and the destruction of natural habitats. 

A timely new report by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) asserts that preventing future pandemics before they emerge requires targeted action to address the underlying causes of pandemics--which  are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change.  Among the solutions the report lays out is the conservation of critical areas for biodiversity,  the financing of this protection,  and the design of a green economic recovery from COVID-19--which offers “an insurance against future outbreaks.”

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The Hill

October 23, 2020
On October 7, California Governor Gavin Newsom took the bold step of committing the state to a goal of protecting 30 percent of California’s land and coastal waters by 2030. 

The move makes a lot of sense for California. It is a global biodiversity hotspot because of its unique plant diversity, and harbors rich and productive marine ecosystems. But this bounty is threatened by the confluence of the climate crisis, overexploitation and development. Its latest manifestation has been the apocalyptic fires that have burned more than four million acres. 

California has very old trees, including the giant sequoias that are over 3,000 years old. There’s been a lot of fires in those 3,000 years, but the ancient forests survived, because fire was part of the ecology of the system. But the forests could not survive the human assault. Logging these natural treasures started a chain of events that led to the present fires, exacerbated by the heat waves caused by global warming.

The solution to the current crisis is protecting the wild, and restoring and rewilding degraded lands and coasts, in partnership with Indigenous Peoples. A commitment to 30 percent by 2030 — ‘30x30’ — is a great way to start.

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The New York Times

October 23, 2020
The European Union’s Environment Council on Friday endorsed the proposal by the president of the European Union to create protected areas for 30 percent of the continent’s land and water by 2030, along with legally binding measures to tighten forest protections.

But Europe’s governing body also was criticized by environmental and climate activists for not curbing agricultural subsidies that drive pollution.

Britain, Canada and the state of California have made similar conservation pledges in recent months. Their promises, mostly without detailed road maps, come in the wake of a major United Nations-backed scientific report that calls for transformative changes in the way humans use the Earth’s land and waters in order to avoid dire consequences, including threats to the global food supply and health.

[…]

The conservation group, Campaign for Nature, approved the move, saying in a statement that “the litmus test will now be the effective implementation of the strategy,” particularly by the member nations of the European Union.

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The Guardian

October 22, 2020
A US senator has introduced a proposal to conserve 30% of the country’s lands and seas in the next 10 years, amid a surge of similar proposals.

The initiative, brought by the New Mexico senator Tom Udall last week, is called the “30 by 30” plan. In the US, 12% of land area is protected, according to Udall, mostly in Alaska and the west. If passed, the resolution would align the United States with international goals to protect and preserve nearly a third of the world’s land and water by 2030.

“The United States faces a conservation and climate crisis, with nature in a steep decline and greenhouse gas emissions not declining at the rate scientists say is needed,” according to the proposal. “Nature, like the climate, is nearing a tipping point.”

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Thomson Reuters

October 20, 2020
As recent headlines about forest blazes, melting glaciers and sinking islands have made clear, the natural world is in peril. And with repeated warnings about the grim state of biodiversity - and, at the same time, promising predictions about the role of nature in boosting our economies and protecting our health - we need a change in the way we are protecting nature, more than ever before. 

Right now, government officials in countries around the globe, from Canada to Australia, are beginning to take note of a solution critical to a global effort to stop the breakdown of nature. That is partnering with indigenous peoples and local communities who have successfully conserved the biodiversity on their lands for millennia, using traditional knowledge passed down through generations. 

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Scuba Diving

October 19, 2020
Loss of tourism revenue from continued COVID travel restrictions is straining the budgets of marine protected areas around the world, reducing conservation activities and stressing the communities reliant on a steady flow of eco-tourists. These strains come as the push to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030 gains global momentum.

[…]

“There is a myth, right? That we have to choose between the economy and the environment,” said Dr. Enric Sala. An ecologist, Sala is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who founded the Pristine Seas program and is one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nature. Both initiatives aim to persuade world leaders to establish new marine protected areas.

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New Straits Times

October 11, 2020
Several members of the biodiversity community were abuzz last week with news that IPBES, the Intergovernmental Platform on Science-Policy Advice on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, was being considered for this year's Nobel Peace Prize (NPP), nominated by a senior German government minister and others.

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced an extremely deserving winner from within the UN family, the World Food Programme (WFP).

But when one looks at the history of the NPP, I believe there's a very good chance IPBES, which today is just eight years into existence, will be recognised in similar fashion one day.

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Mongabay

October 9, 2020
In 2010, the member nations of the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 195 countries plus the EU, agreed that at least 17% of global land and 10% of the ocean needed to be protected by 2020.

A new global review finds that many countries have fallen short of these targets, and the expansion of protected areas over the past 10 years has not successfully covered priority areas such as biodiversity hotspots and areas providing ecosystem services.

The research team overlaid maps of protected areas, threatened species, productive fisheries, and carbon services, and found that 78% of known threatened species do not have adequate protection.

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