Campaign for Nature

May 20, 2021
Today, the ICCA Consortium released its Territories of Life: 2021 Report. The report includes the most up-to-date analysis of how much of the planet is likely conserved by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, estimating that they are conserving more than 22% of the extent of the world’s Key Biodiversity Areas on land and at least 21% of the world’s lands. The report also found that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the de facto custodians of many existing state and private protected and conserved areas, without being recognized as such, underscoring the critical need for equitable governance and the importance of ensuring that all existing and new protected and conserved areas fully respect Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights.

In addition to providing updated spatial analyses and related findings, the report details 17 case studies of territories of life from five continents, highlighting concrete examples of how Indigenous Peoples and local communities sustain our planet and describing what types of actions are needed to better support them, their rights, and their contributions to biodiversity.

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Reuters

May 19, 2021
Germany helped launch a new billion-dollar fund on Wednesday to tackle rapidly depleting global biodiversity, as countries missed key land and marine conservation targets but prepare to ramp up efforts in the decade ahead.

Protecting biodiversity has risen up the global agenda, not least because scientists say the destruction of remote natural habitats facilitates the spread of diseases such as the new coronavirus to humans as they come into closer contact with other species.

The United Nations hopes to secure an agreement at the next Biodiversity Convention meeting in China in October to protect and conserve 30% of the Earth's land and water by 2030.

"The concept of '30 by 30' is quite a big political ask, but we need these kinds of targets because they are a perfect way to harness political will," said James Hardcastle, a conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), referring to the campaign by its tagline.

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The Conversation

May 11, 2021
President Joe Biden calls climate change “the existential crisis of our time” and has taken steps to curb it that match those words. They include returning the U.S. to the Paris Agreement; creating a new climate Cabinet position; introducing a plan to slash fossil fuel subsidies; and announcing ambitious goals to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

But climate change is not the only global environmental threat that demands attention. Scientists widely agree that loss of wildlife and the natural environment is an equally urgent crisis. Some argue that biodiversity loss threatens to become Earth’s sixth mass extinction. But unlike efforts to fight climate change – which center on clear, measurable goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – there is no globally accepted metric for saving biodiversity.

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The Hill

May 8, 2021
How much do you know about the natural world around you? According to a recent survey by SWNS Digital, a majority of people know less than one might assume. 

The results of the survey revealed to researchers some of the common misconceptions that people have about the “shrinking natural world,” like the incorrect assumption that it is more concerning for the environment when an animal goes extinct rather than a plant or insect. According to the survey of 2,000 respondents, approximately 64 percent believed this to be true. 

The survey also revealed that the average person believes that the planet loses 101 species per year to extinction, when in reality the number is actually at least 100 times that amount. 

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Mongabay

May 7, 2021
The world is brimming with bad news about people failing to take care of the Earth. But there is a way to change the narrative, says Canadian conservationist Harvey Locke. The key, according to him, is to strive for a “nature positive” world that is less about destruction and more about restoration.

“We know we’re on a rocket sled into the abyss, and we need to turn that around 100%, going the other direction on a rocket sled towards a positive solution,” Locke told Mongabay in an interview. “Tinkering is not possible. We can’t just [take] an old crystal radio set where you just kind of turn the dial a little bit [to] move from one station to another. It won’t work. We need to be on the internet, instead of listening to the radio — that kind of level of change.”

Locke is the lead author of a new paper published April 30, a few days before the start of a six-week virtual meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), an intergovernmental scientific advisory body to the parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At this meeting, the SBSTTA will provide advice on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, Guido Broekhoven, head of policy research and development at WWF, told Mongabay in an interview.

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Campaign For Nature

April 27, 2021
Last week, at Biden’s Earth Day Summit, world leaders made bold and sweeping pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions—a critical step toward achieving the Paris climate agreement. At the same time, heads of state from France, the U.K., Germany, Gabon and Costa Rica, among others speaking at the Summit, made the powerful case that we can’t solve the climate crisis without tackling the biodiversity crisis. 

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Bloomberg Green

April 8, 2021
The lemurs of Madagascar and Himalayan snow leopards are among the hundreds of endemic species that will all but disappear if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked. 

The plants and animals that are unique to a single location such as one island or one country, are particularly vulnerable to climate change, according to research by a global team of scientists published in the Biological Conservation journal on Friday. They’re almost three times more likely to go extinct, according to an analysis of almost 300 biodiversity hotspots on land and sea. 

“Unfortunately, our study shows that those biodiversity rich-spots will not be able to act as a safe haven from climate change,” said Mariana Vale, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a co-author of the study. “This could greatly increase extinction rates worldwide.”

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BBC

April, 8, 2021
Speaking at an IMF and World Bank meeting, Prince William said protecting nature continued to play only a small part in combating global warming.

He said investing in reforestation and sustainable agriculture were "cost effective" ways of tackling the issue.

Banks have come under increasing pressure to step up efforts to help fight climate change.

Just this week, Barclays' London headquarters was the target of a protest staged by climate activist group Extinction Rebellion. Members held placards and broke several windows as they called on the bank to stop financing fossil fuel companies.

Addressing central bankers and finance ministers at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the duke said the world's natural habitats continue to decline at an "alarming rate".

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Reuters

April 8, 2021
Green debt swaps have the potential to spur accelerated action on climate change in developing countries, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday, pledging to present an option for such instruments by November.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said it made sense to address the dual climate and debt crises at the same time, and IMF members on Thursday had strongly backed the Fund taking a bigger role on the issue of climate risk.

“When we are faced with this dual crisis - the debt pressures on countries and the climate crisis, to which many low-income countries are highly, highly vulnerable - it makes sense to seek this unity of purpose,” Georgieva said.

“In other words, green debt swaps have the potential to contribute to climate finance. They have the potential to facilitate accelerated action in developing countries,” she told reporters after a meeting of the IMF’s steering committee.

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The New York Times

April 7, 2021
How does a country deal with climate disasters when it’s drowning in debt? Not very well, it turns out. Especially not when a pandemic clobbers its economy.

Take Belize, Fiji and Mozambique. Vastly different countries, they are among dozens of nations at the crossroads of two mounting global crises that are drawing the attention of international financial institutions: climate change and debt.

They owe staggering amounts of money to various foreign lenders. They face staggering climate risks, too. And now, with the coronavirus pandemic pummeling their economies, there is a growing recognition that their debt obligations stand in the way of meeting the immediate needs of their people — not to mention the investments required to protect them from climate disasters.

The combination of debt, climate change and environmental degradation “represents a systemic risk to the global economy that may trigger a cycle that depresses revenues, increases spending and exacerbates climate and nature vulnerabilities,” according to a new assessment by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and others, which was seen by The Times. It comes after months of pressure from academics and advocates for lenders to address this problem.

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The Globe and Mail

March 31, 2021
The organizations that represent academic research within the Group of Seven nations have a message for world leaders: The same kind of scientific expertise that proved crucial to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic is also required to address a broader set of environmental and health challenges facing humanity.

In a joint communique released on Wednesday, science academies from each of the countries, including the Royal Society of Canada, call for urgent and co-ordinated action by their respective countries on three priority areas – climate change, biodiversity loss, and the need for better access to data during international health emergencies. 

Expert panels, convened over the past several months, have produced recommendations in all three of the priority areas, aimed at driving discussions in June at the next meeting of leaders from the G7 club of economically developed countries.

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CNN

March 24, 2021
"It is a sad thing to think that nature speaks and that mankind does not listen." This remark, made in 1870 by the poet and novelist Victor Hugo, is even more relevant today. At a time when biodiversity -- the fragile web of life of which we are all a part -- threatens to disintegrate, we must not forget that we are, in many respects, the authors of our own misfortune.

Intersecting and escalating crises -- climate disruption, the collapse of biodiversity, the declining health of the ocean and the depletion of natural resources -- clearly demonstrate that we cannot continue on our current path. Our relationship with nature, traditionally based on domination and exploitation, has already altered some 75% of the land's surface and 40% of the marine environment. The global rate of species extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years, and around 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This cannot continue.

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Bloomberg Green

March 21, 2021
Global businesses sourcing commodities such as cattle, soybeans or rubber stand to lose some $53 billion due to deforestation unless they take action.

In a survey of more than 500 global businesses, climate-disclosure platform CDP identified risks such as extreme weather, changes in consumer preferences, as well as market and reputational impacts from commodity-related forest loss. It would cost $6.6 billion in the coming years to address those risks, the London-based nonprofit said in a report Monday.

“The destruction of the world’s vital forests poses huge risks to the climate, nature, the economy, and also increases the risk of future pandemics,” Sareh Forouzesh, CDP’s associate director of forests, said in a statement. “There is a solid business case for companies sourcing commodities sustainably and taking steps to protect forests.”

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UNEP

March 10, 2021
One year from the onset of the pandemic, recovery spending has fallen short of nations’ commitments to build back more sustainably. An analysis of spending by leading economies, led by Oxford’s Economic Recovery Project and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), finds only 18.0% of announced recovery spending can be considered ‘green.’

The report, Are We Building Back Better? Evidence from 2020 and Pathways for Inclusive Green Recovery Spending, calls for governments to invest more sustainably and tackle inequalities as they stimulate growth in the wake of the devastation wrought by the pandemic.

The most comprehensive analysis of COVID-19-related fiscal rescue and recovery efforts by 50 leading economies so far, the report reveals that only $368bn of $14.6tn COVID-induced spending (rescue and recovery) in 2020 was green.

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PhysOrg

March 8, 2021
The economic benefits of conserving or restoring natural sites "outweigh" the profit potential of converting them for intensive human use, according to the largest-ever study comparing the value of protecting nature at particular locations with that of exploiting it.

A research team led by the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) analysed dozens of sites—from Kenya to Fiji and China to the UK—across six continents. A previous breakthrough study in 2002 only had information for five sites.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, come just weeks after a landmark report by Cambridge Professor Partha Dasgupta called for the value of biodiversity to be placed at the heart of global economics.

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