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| Thu, 13th Feb 2020 16:30:00 |
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Salvation or Pipe Dream? A Movement Grows to Protect Up to Half the Planet |
As humans continue to rapidly expand the scope of their domination of nature — bulldozing and burning down forests and other natural areas, wiping out species, and breaking down ecosystem functions — a growing number of influential scientists and conservationists think protecting half of the planet in some form is key to keeping it habitable.
The idea first received public attention in 2016 when E.O. Wilson, the legendary 90-year-old conservation biologist, published the idea in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. "We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along," he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.
Once thought of as aspirational, many are now taking these ideas seriously, not only as a firewall to protect biodiversity, but also to mitigate continued climate warming.
One of the major reasons for adoption of these extreme preservation goals is a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which found that more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Conducted by hundreds of researchers around the world, the study is considered the most comprehensive analysis of the state of the world's biodiversity ever.
Some scientists are concerned that the planet has been so altered that ecosystems could be near a tipping point.
That report concluded that it's not only species that are at risk, however. The myriad life-support functions that these species and ecosystems provide also are threatened — everything from clean water and air, flood control and climate regulation, food, and a host of other services.
Moreover, some scientists are concerned that the face of the globe has been so altered that the global ecosystem could be near a tipping point that would disrupt the climate and biological systems that sustain life and cause widespread — and perhaps disastrous — environmental instability.
The ambitious goal of protecting and restoring natural systems on a large scale is shared by a number of groups and people.
Billionaire Swiss medical technology entrepreneur Hansjörg Wyss, for example, has pledged $1 billion to support these goals, funding a non-profit, the Wyss Campaign for Nature, in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Wyss is supporting the goals of the so-called "30x30" movement, a highly ambitious initiative that aims to protect 30 percent of the planet, on land and at sea, by 2030.
Another organization called Nature Needs Half has drawn in scientists and conservation groups — including the Sierra Club and the International Union for Conservation of Nature — that are pressing for the protection of 50 percent of the planet by 2030.
The European Parliament has pledged to protect 30 percent of European Union territory, restore degraded ecosystems, add biodiversity objectives into all EU policies, and earmark 10 percent of the budget for improvement of biodiversity.
United States' Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado, working with conservation organizations, recently introduced a resolution to drum up support for protection of 30 percent of the U.S.'s land and marine areas.
All eyes are now on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a multilateral treaty created by the United Nations, whose 187 member countries will meet this October in Kunming, China to write a 10-year biodiversity plan. A preparatory planning meeting is taking place this month in Rome.
The 2010 CBD meeting called for 17 percent of the terrestrial planet to be protected in some form and 10 percent of the oceans by this year. That goal was not reached — currently about 16 percent of the terrestrial planet has been protected, and less than 8 percent of marine ecosystems. So reaching the 2030 goal would require a near doubling of land protections and a quadrupling of ocean protections — all in the next decade.
It's a daunting challenge, even if the will is there, with some countries — notably Brazil and the U.S. — moving in the opposite direction. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has opened up the Amazon rainforest to an onslaught of land-clearing, logging, and agricultural development. And last year the Trump Administration eliminated the Landscape Conservation Cooperative Network, an Obama-era program that created 22 research centers to tackle landscape-level conservation problems across the U.S. The Trump administration also is either opening up, or proposing to open up, large areas of protected federal lands to oil and gas drilling and other resource exploitation, including the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
It's estimated that the U.S. alone loses a football field of nature every 30 seconds. Far more natural lands are being lost in the Brazilian Amazon, with more than 10 square miles of rainforest being burned or cleared every day.
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