‘World isn’t meeting biodiversity targets’
Adecade-long global effort to save Earth’s disappearing species and declining ecosystems has mostly stumbled, with fragile habitats like coral reefs and tropical forests in more trouble than ever, researchers said in a report Tuesday.
In 2010, more than 150 countries agreed to goals to protect nature, but the new United Nations scorecard found that the world has largely failed to meet 20 different targets to safeguard species and ecosystems.
Six of those 20 goals were “partially achieved,” and the rest were not.
If this were a school and these were tests, the world has flunked, said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which released the report.
Inger Andersen, who leads the UN environment program, called it a global failure.
“From COVID-19 to massive wildfires, floods, melting glaciers and unprecedented heat, our failure to meet the Aichi (biodiversity) targets – protect our home – has very real consequences,” Andersen said. “We can no longer afford to cast nature to the side.”
In a Tuesday interview with The Associated Press, former UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-Moon connected the problems to “a lack of global partnership and political leadership.” He said multilateralism has been under attack, citing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement as an example.
The UN team and report authors said the study is not meant to stoke despair, but to galvanize governments to take stronger actions over the next decade to protect the diversity of life.
“Some progress has been made, but inadequate progress. A lot still needs to be done,” Mrema said. “The key is to get the political will and the commitment.”
Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the new report, said it’s good that countries are getting together to examine their biodiversity goals but some of the targets are nebulous. Reducing “everything on the planet to single scores” obscures the fact that the picture may look different in different places, he said.
Threatened
For years, conservation activists have used the polar bear as a poster child for species in trouble - especially those threatened by climate change, which the report connects to biodiversity loss. But Mrema and lead author David Cooper said the world should think about a different poster animal: humans.
“A lot of things civilizations depend on are certainly threatened,” he said.
The report was originally slated to be released at a UN conference to set biodiversity targets for the next decade, but the event in Kunming, China, was postponed until next year due to the pandemic.
Last week, the World Wide Fund for Nature released new research detailing how monitored populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish have declined, on average, 68%, between 1970 and 2016.
Consequences
“With pandemic deaths surging and wildfires raging across the entire West Coast, never have the consequences of our misuse and abuse of the natural world been more clear,” said Julia Baum, a biologist at Canada’s University of Victoria who wasn’t part of the report.
As countries prepare to restart their economies after combating the coronavirus, there’s an opportunity to do better – or much worse – for the planet, Cooper said.
“Some countries are relaxing environmental regulations, but others are investing in a green recovery,” he said.
One of the challenges in meeting global biodiversity targets is a mismatch between countries with abundant natural assets – such as large tracts of intact tropical forests – and those with money to enforce protections.
“The biodiversity hotspots tend to be in poorer countries,” and wealthy countries need to be willing to provide financial or practical support to help other nations, Cooper said.
Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who also wasn’t part of the report, said the world is at a crossroads.
“We still have the chance to save most of the world’s endangered species and vulnerable ecosystems,” Worm said. “Now we face a historic choice to either seize this opportunity, and rebuild what has been lost, or to let the world’s species slide further into oblivion.”
He said it’s striking that Earth’s biodiversity took millions of years to evolve, “yet we could destroy much of it in a matter of decades – or safeguard it for generations to come.”
“It’s our choice,” he added.
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BRUSSELS: The European Union’s top official proposed a more ambitious target Wednesday for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, setting a reduction goal of at least 55% by 2030 compared to the current target of 40%.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen predicted the new target will be “too much for some and not enough for others,” but she told lawmakers in her first State of the Union address that it should help the 27-nation EU achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
“Our economy and industry can manage this, and they want it, too,” Von der Leyen said as she set out her priorities while speaking in the European Parliament.
EU leaders agreed last year to make the bloc’s economy carbon-neutral by the middle of the century.
Von der Leyen said she wants 37% of the 750 billioneuro coronavirus recovery fund approved by EU countries to be spent on environmental objectives, adding that 30% of the fund should be raised through “green” bonds whose proceeds are meant to have a positive impact on the environment.
The EU also plans to dedicate a quarter of its budget to tackling climate change and to work to shift 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) in investment toward making the EU’s economy more environmentally friendly over the next 10 years.
According to the EU, its greenhouse gas emissions already decreased by 23% between 1990 and 2018, a period when the economy grew by 61%.
World leaders agreed five years ago in Paris to keep global warming below 2ºC (3.6ºF), ideally no more than 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) by the end of the century. Scientists say countries will miss both of those goals by a wide margin unless drastic steps are taken to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Von der Leyen also confirmed the EU is working on a kind of carbon tax aimed at avoiding a situation in which EU countries reduce emissions, but at the same time import goods embedded with CO2.
“Carbon must have its price because nature cannot pay this price anymore,” she said.
While endorsing the idea of a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” at EU borders, Green members of the European Parliament said the proposed 55% cut to emissions was not enough, pushing for a 65% reduction.
“Droughts & global fires show that we need more effort to limit #GlobalWarming,” the Greens group wrote in a message posted on Twitter. Environment organization Friends of the Earth was also critical, urging the EU to opt for a fossilfree economy “to avoid devastating warming.”