The Lay of the Land and Sea
Biodiversity—the sheer number and variety of plant, animal, and other living species on the planet—is essential for our planet’s health. In diversity, there is resilience: the greater the diversity of life on Earth, the better our planet can mitigate and adapt to challenges like resource depletion, population growth, and climate change, and continue providing a suitable home for all the species that live here—not least humans.
Earth is experiencing one of the most dramatic extinction episodes in history, posing enormous risks to human prosperity and well-being. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently warned that we are exploiting nature far more rapidly than it can renew itself. If we don’t change course, up to one million known species could disappear by 2050, with dire consequences for planetary health.
If ever there was a chance to reverse this trend, it is now.
Representatives from 196 countries party to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity are working over the next year to negotiate and establish a new global framework to protect nature and reverse this decades-long decline in biodiversity. The negotiators are discussing expanding protected areas globally, better governance of natural capital and the productive sectors that utilize them, better enforcement of existing biodiversity conservation rules and regulations—and, perhaps most daunting, how governments and the private sector will mobilize financial resources to pay for global biodiversity conservation to ensure the long-term sustainability of earth’s critical ecosystems.
As the world grapples with both the health and financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be easy to say that we can’t afford to worry about nature right now. But the cost of doing nothing—in both economic and planetary health terms—is far greater. In fact, research from the World Economic Forum shows that around half gross world product is highly or moderately dependent on nature.
We cannot have healthy, prosperous societies if we don’t protect biodiversity and the ecosystems on which we depend. To achieve this in the long-term, we need a transformational shift in how we value nature in our economies. However, this won’t happen overnight—in the meantime, we must scale up how much we spend on protecting nature to slow and halt biodiversity loss.
Deutz, A., Heal, G. M., Niu, R., Swanson, E., Townshend, T., Zhu, L., Delmar, A., Meghji, A., Sethi, S. A., and Tobin-de la Puente, J. 2020.
