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Countries are willing to lose all the goals they set a decade ago to preserve nature and save the Earth’s vital biodiversity, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Humanity’s impact on the natural world over the past five decades has been cataclysmic: Since 1970, about 70 percent of wildlife, birds and fish have disappeared, according to a WWF assessment this month.
Last year, the UN panel on biodiversity, IPBES, warned that one million species are facing extinction because human activity has already severely degraded three-quarters of Earth’s land.
In 2010, 190 member states of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity committed to a battle plan to limit the damage inflicted on the natural world by 2020.
The 20 goals range from phasing out fossil fuel subsidies to limiting habitat loss and protecting fish populations.
But in its latest Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO), released on Tuesday, the UN said none of these targets would be met.
“We are currently systematically exterminating all non-human living beings,” Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of IPBES, told AFP.
Ahead of the UN General Assembly and a crucial year of diplomacy for nature and climate, the assessment said that none of the biodiversity goals would be fully met, “undermining efforts to address climate change.”
The most dangerous species of humans
The coronavirus pandemic has thwarted plans for two major biodiversity summits this year, with the COP15 negotiations and the global congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature aiming to boost international nature preservation efforts. , delayed until 2021.
Larigauderie said the global health crisis should serve as a wake-up call to world leaders.
“We collectively better understand that this crisis is linked to everything we want to discuss in the COP15 talks” in China, he said.
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told AFP that societies are realizing the importance of nature.
“The situation with Covid has shown very clearly that deforestation, human invasion of nature … has an impact on our daily lives,” he said.
“The public has realized that the most dangerous species is us, human beings, and that they themselves must play a role and put pressure on the industry to change.”
The assessment lays out pathways to reverse the loss of nature during the decade through 2030, including radical changes to our agricultural system and reductions in food waste and overconsumption.
Planetary emergency
The GBO said that some progress towards nature protection had been made in the last decade.
For example, the rate of deforestation has dropped by around a third compared to the previous decade.
In the 20-year period since 2000, protected areas increased from 10 percent of the land to 15 percent, and from 3 percent of the oceans to at least 7 percent today.
But among the dangers to nature detailed in the report is the continued prevalence of fossil fuel subsidies, which its authors estimated in the range of $ 500 billion annually.
David Cooper, the lead author of the GBO assessment, said there were segments of society with “vested interests” preventing governments from reducing support for the polluting industry.
“(The subsidies) are harmful to biodiversity and, in most cases, together they are harmful economically and socially,” he told AFP.
Reacting to the UN assessment, Andy Purvis of the Department of Life Sciences at Britain’s Natural History Museum said it was “shocking” that the world failed to meet its 20 nature protection targets.
“We have to recognize that we are in a planetary emergency. If we continue with business as usual, we will all be bankrupt, “he said.
“It is not just that species will go extinct, but ecosystems will be too damaged to meet the needs of society.”
(AFP)
