The Washington Post

December 2, 2020
This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U.N. State of the Climate report published Wednesday.

To mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris accord, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres summarized the findings in unusually stark terms.

“To put it simply,” he said in a speech at Columbia University, “the state of the planet is broken.”

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The Guardian

December 2, 2020
Humanity is facing a new war, unprecedented in history, the secretary general of the UN has warned, which is in danger of destroying our future before we have fully understood the risk.

The stark message from António Guterres follows a year of global upheaval, with the coronavirus pandemic causing governments to shut down whole countries for months at a time, while wildfires, hurricanes and powerful storms have scarred the globe.

Guterres said: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help to solve it.”

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Thomson Reuters Foundation

November 30, 2020

[…] As the world faces increasingly frequent and severe shocks - from the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme weather linked to climate change - it will need to re-evaluate its priorities, from a focus on efficiency to the value of interconnectedness, he said.

That might extend as far as fundamentally rethinking how key planetary life-support systems - such as the fast-disappearing Amazon rainforest - are governed as a global resource, said Rockstrom, an earth scientist and leading thinker on resilience.

“If the Amazon rainforest crashes, we will lose jobs in Germany,” he said.

“It will create so much havoc in the climate system” as temperature increases accelerate and rainfall shifts, he warned.

“When something unacceptable happens in one corner of the planet, it sends invoices across the whole world,” he added.

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Visual Capitalist

November 24, 2020
Earth’s biodiversity has seen an overall decrease across the globe. And while each region has seen a decline, some places have experienced higher drops than others.

Using data from WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020, we’ve ranked each region from the greatest average loss in biodiversity, to the least:

Latin America and Caribbean has seen the most loss, with a 94% drop in average species populations, while Africa comes in second with a 65% drop.

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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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Campaign for Nature

November 11, 2020
This week, leaders of 450 public development banks representing 10% of total global investment will gather to discuss the role public finance can play in driving sustainable development that benefits people and the planet. 

The Finance in Common Summit will underscore the role nature-positive public finance can play in establishing a healthy environment, critical to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Climate Agreement targets and the new, ambitious framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Central to this framework is a target to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030. 

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Project Syndicate

November 11, 2020
Public development banks will be critical to global efforts to build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. To realize their potential, they should complement their climate investments by setting explicit nature-based goals and targets.

This week’s Finance in Common Summit will mark the first time that leaders of the world’s 450 public development banks (PDBs) come together to discuss how to reorient investments toward sustainable development. Given the current global economic uncertainty and compounding environmental threats, the gathering comes at a critical moment. It is a welcome opportunity to consider how public financial institutions can help steer funding toward conservation and sustainable use of natural resources – thus opening up an asset class that supports both people and the planet.

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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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New Europe

October 30, 2020
The European Council has endorsed the objectives of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 and the nature protection and restoration targets contained therein, which aim at setting biodiversity on the path to recovery.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has once again shown us the fundamental importance of ecosystems and biodiversity for our health and economic and social stability,” Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety Svenja Schulze said. “Biodiversity is our life insurance: it supplies clean air and water, food, building material and clothing. It creates jobs and livelihoods. With the destruction of nature there is also the risk of disease outbreaks and pandemics. Saving biodiversity and global nature conservation is a key to preventing new infectious diseases. As President of the Council I am pleased that today we reached unanimous agreement on stepping up our efforts to address biodiversity loss,” she added.

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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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Forbes

October 26, 2020
A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that protecting an additional 5% of the ocean can increase future fish catch by 20% or more. Growing up in a fishing community in the Philippines, lead researcher Dr. Reniel Cabral believes that marine protected areas (MPAs) can benefit both conservation and fisheries goals simultaneously. In the past, MPAs have been used as conservation tools, however a focus on fisheries may provide a necessary incentive for many coastal nations to adopt or expand them.

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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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