Issued on: 03/09/2021 -
People walk towards the entrance of the IUCN World Conservation Congress on September 2, 2021, in Marseille, France. © Nicolas Tucat, AFP
Text by: Tiffany FILLON
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference started on Friday in France’s second-largest city Marseille – with NGOs and scientists hoping to take the world from a sense of urgency to concrete action to protect the planet's imperilled wildlife
After wildfires and extreme climate events across the planet – not to mention the latest IPCC report – underlined this summer that climate change is already a terrifying reality, the IUCN conference opened on September 3 to bring together NGOs, scientists, businesses, indigenous peoples and government representatives from across the world.
NGOs are especially keen to use this eight-day conference to make a difference. Seeing as the conference is open to the general public this year, they see impressing on people just how the stakes are for biodiversity as one of their most important missions.
“People from our organisations will be there to raise awareness – and we will be demonstrating on a local beach to warn about the degradation of the world’s seas and oceans,” said Maxime Paquin, project manager for biodiversity at France Nature Environnement, an umbrella group of French environmental NGOs.
>> Bombshell UN climate change report shows global warming accelerating
But for NGOs gathering at the conference their biggest objective is to use it as a “platform to make political points”, Paquin said. Like other NGOs, France Nature Environnement will vote on 19 motions – including the protection of marine mammals, the protection of ancient European forests and limiting the mining industry’s impact on biodiversity.
These recommendations are not legally binding – but they will allow NGOs to influence discussions at the COP15 on biodiversity in China in October and the COP26 on climate change in the UK in November.
“We’re keen to use our influence at the IUCN to carry these motions forward and then lobby for them to be implemented across the world,” said Pierre Cannet, director of advocacy for WWF France.
A highlight of the conference will be an update to the IUCN’s endangered species list – which places endangered species on a spectrum of seven categories, from “least concern” to a definitive “extinct”. Currently around a million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
‘Lack of means’
Since 1900, the number of local species in most territorial habitats has declined by around 20 percent on average, the IPBES has said. The scientific consensus is clear: The disappearance of entire species and ecosystems is a direct consequence of human activity such as pollution, deforestation and overfishing – and is a considerable danger to the wellbeing of humanity.
In the face of this menace, the IUCN conference represents a “good way of regrouping and looking at how countries can take urgent steps going forward, in a context where economic recovery plans are drawn up at that global level and national budgets devote very little to biodiversity”, Cannet said.
>> ‘Humanity is bullying nature – and we will pay the price,’ WWF chief tells FRANCE 24
“We’re trying to ensure that France makes a difference when it comes to biodiversity,” Cannet continued, denouncing its “failure to enact a green agricultural transition and backtracking on banning the use of pesticides like neonicotinoids and glyphosate”.
Paquin, meanwhile, hopes that this conference will put the thorny issue of funding on the table. Governments have not directed sufficient funding to protect biodiversity, so efforts to do so “lack the means”, he said. Consequently, they intend to rely on business and development banks to finance the ecological transition.
As WWF France has highlighted, the International Development Finance Club – a union of development banks led by the French Development Agency – could play a major role in protecting diversity through the allocation of funding for biodiversity, as it commits $630 billion (€530bn) per year to economic development, which includes $100 billion dedicated specifically to tackling climate change.
People should not expect miraculous change to emerge from the IUCN conference, Cannet said. But it could well act as a “stepping stone towards measures against actions that harm biodiversity”.
This article was adapted from the original in French.
Plastic pollution: the scourge in the Mediterranean Sea
Issued on:
French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to urge world leaders and institutions to safeguard biodiversity as they work to curb climate change and support human welfare at a global summit starting Friday in the French southern city of Marseille. In the Mediterranean Sea, plastic pollution is a real scourge.
Global environment conference in Marseille to focus on wildlife protection
Issued on: 03/09/2021 -
The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organisation for the protection of nature begins on Friday, hoping to galvanise action on the world’s intertwined biodiversity and climate crises.
Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference in the French city of Marseille.
“We are facing huge challenges. We are seeing the climate changing and impacting hugely our societies. We are seeing biodiversity disappearing and the pandemic hitting our economies, our families, our health,” said IUCN chief Bruno Oberle in a speech before the Marseille meeting opened.
“And we know that all these challenges are linked to each other and these challenges are linked to our human behaviour.”
The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial UN summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.
'Nature at top of priorities'
French President Emmanuel Macron said the goal was to “put nature at the top of international priorities” in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.
“Because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities.”
Macron said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.
The international community is trying to frame interim goals for this decade as well as longer-term aims for 2050.
Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.
But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.
In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction—raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.
Interwoven threats
The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opened on Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.
Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.
Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild.
The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.
Motions on the table include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combating wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.
The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.
Oberle thanked indigenous groups for joining the IUCN’s membership and bringing a “wealth of experience” on how to have a different relationship with the planet.
(AFP)
Issued on: 03/09/2021 -
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the IUCN World Conservation Congress on September 3, 2021, in Marseille, France.
© Ludovic Marin, AFP
The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organisation for the protection of nature begins on Friday, hoping to galvanise action on the world’s intertwined biodiversity and climate crises.
Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference in the French city of Marseille.
“We are facing huge challenges. We are seeing the climate changing and impacting hugely our societies. We are seeing biodiversity disappearing and the pandemic hitting our economies, our families, our health,” said IUCN chief Bruno Oberle in a speech before the Marseille meeting opened.
“And we know that all these challenges are linked to each other and these challenges are linked to our human behaviour.”
The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial UN summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.
'Nature at top of priorities'
French President Emmanuel Macron said the goal was to “put nature at the top of international priorities” in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.
“Because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities.”
Macron said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.
The international community is trying to frame interim goals for this decade as well as longer-term aims for 2050.
Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.
But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.
In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction—raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.
Interwoven threats
The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opened on Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.
Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.
Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild.
The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.
Motions on the table include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combating wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.
The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.
Oberle thanked indigenous groups for joining the IUCN’s membership and bringing a “wealth of experience” on how to have a different relationship with the planet.
(AFP)
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