Conservation International

August 9, 2021
Nature is in crisis: Nearly 1 million species face extinction due to human activities and climate change.

To help prevent widespread ecological collapse, many world leaders have rallied around a common goal to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030 — a target informally known as the “30 by 30" initiative.

However, the environmental movement has a complicated past when it comes to working with the world’s Indigenous peoples. Though they are custodians of more than a quarter of Earth’s land and seas and protect 80 percent of global biodiversity, Indigenous peoples have frequently been sidelined from environmental efforts — in some cases, even removed from their territories in the name of conservation.

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MirageNews

August 5, 2021
Improving ecosystem integrity is essential to ensuring human and planetary wellbeing. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are working to adopt a consistent and accurate method to define and measure ecosystem integrity. In the new paper recently published in Conservation Letters, “Towards monitoring forest ecosystem integrity within the Post-2020 biodiversity framework“, scientists and biodiversity experts from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and eight other leading institutions share a pathway to fill this critical gap.

While ecological integrity often goes undefined, this new joint paper establishes a quantifiable definition for it, delineating ecological integrity as a measure of the structure, function and composition of an ecosystem compared to pre-industrial levels. Then, building from metrics, such as the Global Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network’s (GEO BON) Essential Biodiversity Variables, the authors recommend eight key indicators to evaluate ecological integrity, indexing vital markers such as deforestation, species habitat, biodiversity loss or ecosystem resilience. The paper demonstrates how advances in earth observations can be harnessed to track these metrics, providing a clearer picture of the earth’s valuable ecosystems and a way to measure progress towards our biodiversity goals.

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BirdLife International

July 30, 2021
It has been hard not to be deeply affected by the events of the past few weeks: catastrophic floods in Germany, China and India killing hundreds of people; forest fires in Siberia and North America; and drought and famine in Southern Madagascar. We know these extreme weather events have been triggered by the climate crisis, and it acutely demonstrates that we are now living with the consequences of our collective failure to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

The effects on human lives and livelihoods are horrendous, and there are very serious impacts on wildlife as well. It was appalling, for example, to see the video taken by a volunteer of Turkish BirdLife partner, Doğa Derneği, of thousands of dead baby flamingos near Lake Tuz (Salt Lake) in Anatolia, Turkey. This unbearable scene was the result of a major water shortage in the region. Lower rainfall and unsustainable irrigation practices going back to the 1960s had caused a drought. The situation will only get worse, unless more sustainable water and agriculture practices are introduced at pace.

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Reuters

July 12, 2021
KUALA LUMPUR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Securing an ambitious new global pact to protect nature at a U.N. biodiversity summit later this year will require stronger political leadership from host nation China, officials and observers have warned.

About 195 countries are expected to agree the text of a new treaty to safeguard the planet’s plants, animals and ecosystems, similar to the Paris climate accord, at U.N. talks scheduled for October in the southern Chinese city of Kunming.

But the prospects of sealing a deal at the COP15 summit - already postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic - are dwindling unless in-person talks can happen, U.N. officials say.

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