Good COP, Bad COP

While we at PlantingSeeds focus on local efforts to help biodiversity, we are motivated by the big picture as well. In case you missed the news about COP and biodiversity (yes, the COP UN Glasgow conference wasn’t just about climate change), here are some challenging facts and developments:

  • A 2019 United Nations report found that 1 million species are threatened with extinction with alarming implications for human survival.
  • The landmark report from nearly 150 authors from 50 nations says that more plants and animals are threatened with extinction now than any other period in human history.
  • The decline in biodiversity is eroding ‘the foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide’ according to the panel’s chairman, Robert Watson.
  • The authors urge the world’s governments to address the global decline of biodiversity together with human-caused climate change.
  • Pointing to the links between climate change and biodiversity, the warming climate is a major driver that is exacerbating the effects of overfishing. Other impacts on biodiversity include widespread pesticide use, pollution and urban expansion into the natural world.
  • The COP conference focused on forest, land use change and agriculture in its examination of biodiversity. The world is losing trees at an alarming rate. Global Forest Watch found that in 2020, the world lost nearly 100,000 square miles of tree cover.
  • Recommendations from Leah Gerber, director of the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes at Arizona State University, are to invest in habitat restoration, climate adaptation, habitat connectivity programs and wildlife protection laws.

Which is what we, through the B&B Highway, are trying to do to help biodiversity in our own way.

Report from The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

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