RICH VARIETY OF LIFE ESSENTIAL – UN CHIEF
THE welfare and prosperity of people depend on a “rich variety
- tions Secretary- General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday in his message for the International Day for Biological Diversity.
- cember 1993, when the Convention on Biological Diversity came into force, its parties have acted to con-
a sustainable and fair way.
- gral to meet our goals for sustainable development,” Guterres said, underscoring the importance of protecting, restoring and ensuring access to ecosystems to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger: Goals 1 and 2 of what are known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
To mitigate climate change, he noted that deforestation and land degradation must be reduced while at the same time, enhancing carbon stocks in forests, drylands, rangelands and croplands.
Guterres said it is critical to protect the biodiversity of forests and watersheds to support clean and plentiful water supplies.
Yet, he lamented that biodiversity continues to decline globally.
“The answer is to intensify efforts and build on successes,” Gutteres said.
This year, Guterres said that parties to the convention will work on a new action plan to ensure that biodiversity will be preserved by 2020.
this effort. I urge governments, businesses and people everywhere to act to protect the nature that sustains us. Our collective future depends on it,”
secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said biodiversity is at the heart of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Its decline compounds other challenges, including climate change, water and food security, and public health, which “can potentially lead to catastrophic outcomes for human existence on this planet,” she warned.
“It is therefore, imperative to do everything in our power to halt the destruction of nature,” she emphasized.
“We have two more years to go to redouble our efforts, […] to design a new deal for nature that will take us from 2020 to the middle of this century,” she said, adding: “We don’t have much time. But we have a lot of power if we work together, in a collaborative manner to change the way we use nature and biodiversity.”
This handout photo released on Monday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) shows the Green Turtle. Animal and plant species are vanishing—sometimes before we know they exist—at an accelerating pace, but conservationists are pushing back against the juggernaut of mass extinction.