The destruction of nature threatens humanity just as much or more than climate change – 29/04/2019

The destruction of nature threatens the well-being of the human being "at least as much" as climate changesaid Monday the chairman of the UN group of experts on biodiversity at the beginning of a meeting in Paris.

Scientists and diplomats from 130 countries have started a meeting that will last until Saturday to adopt the first global badessment of ecosystems in the last 15 years, a dark inventory of nature vital to humanity.

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"The evidence is undeniable: our destruction of biodiversity and ecosystem services has reached levels that threaten our well-being at least as much as man-made climate change, "said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES), created in 2012.

For three years, 150 experts worked on a 1,800-page report that will become the true scientific benchmark for biodiversity.

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Even if the word "biodiversity" sometimes seems abstract, in this study, it refers to all the animal or plant species that live on the planet, including the one that threatens to destroy nature, the human species.

Nature, whether composed of pollinating insects or CO2-absorbing forests and oceans, offers invaluable services.

"Until now, we have been talking about the importance of biodiversity primarily from an environmental point of view," observed Robert Watson.

However, he added, "we now insist that nature is crucial for food production, for pure water, for medicines and even for social cohesion".

Many expect this badessment to be a prelude to the adoption of ambitious targets at the 2020 meeting in China of the member states of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. .

Almost none of the 20 goals set for 2020, which indicate a life "in harmony with nature" by 2050, has been achievedaccording to the draft summary report obtained by the AFP agency, which will be discussed, amended and adopted line by line by the delegates before its publication on May 6.

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"The global environmental heritage (…) is being changed to an unprecedented level," warns the synthesis.

A quarter of the 100,000 species badessed so far – a tiny fraction of the estimated eight million on the planet – are threatened with extinctionunder the pressure of agriculture, fishing or climate change.

But scientists believe that this will produce "rapid and imminent acceleration of species extinction rates", according to the draft document.

Thus, between 500,000 and one million species would be threatened, "many of them already in the coming decades".

These projections coincide with a prediction made by scientists a few years ago: the beginning of the sixth "mbad extinction", the first since the appearance of man on the planet.

"Science tells us what traditional knowledge has been telling us for years: Earth is dying," said José Gregorio Mirabal, president of COICA, an umbrella organization of indigenous organizations in the Amazon basin.

"We urgently call for an international agreement by nature, to restore half of the natural world as quickly as possible," he said.

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In this sense, the global report prepared for the first time takes into account the knowledge, problems and priorities of indigenous peoples.

The document links the two threats of global warming to damage to nature, and identifies similar causes, including agricultural practices and deforestation, responsible for a quarter of CO2 and severe emissions. direct damage. ecosystems.

"The group 's recent report on climate change has shown how much climate imbalance threatens biodiversity, and the future IPBES report should show that both problems have common solutions, starting with the first one. Agroecology ", summarized Laurence Tubiana, economist of the architects of the Paris Agreement.

Source: AFP