Next year is a crunch moment for efforts to stem humanity’s destruction of nature. So far, efforts are failing miserably, with a landmark UN report in May finding that our activities have put a million species at risk of extinction.
Fauna and flora are both under threat because governments have failed to deliver on 20 biodiversity targets they agreed nine years ago in Japan, including designating 17 per cent of land as protected areas by 2020, up from less than 10 per cent then.
The report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found more than four-fifths of those targets will be missed. Some countries haven’t even drawn up plans to meet them.
It is against this tough backdrop that UN biodiversity chief Cristiana Pa?ca Palmer has to forge a new post-2020 deal at a key summit next February in China, in order to stop the loss of life. The executive secretary of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and former Romanian minister told New Scientist about her hopes and what needs to be done.
How important is next year for addressing the biodiversity crisis?
It’s a critical year for the planet, not just biodiversity. We are facing, in many respects, a planetary emergency. When we speak about biodiversity, we speak about the infrastructure that supports life here: the fabric, the tissue that is the foundation for our economy, for our livelihood, for our well-being and for our society.
Most governments are making limited or no progress towards the 2020 targets. They aren’t doing enough, are they?
Well, you’re right. This is one of the lessons learned of this last 10 years. We are making progress in the target of protected areas, that’s target 11. But there are other targets that are a bit more difficult and many of them are addressing the root causes of biodiversity loss, and those are in the economic models.
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