Cop15 was Wednesday December 7
To Monday December 19
The world has a new plan to save nature. Here’s how it works — and how it could fail.
At the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, world leaders agreed to a historic plan to halt biodiversity loss.
MONTREAL, Canada — Early Monday morning, after several days of fraught negotiations, roughly 190 countries agreed on a historic plan to halt the decline of wildlife and ecosystems.
Adopted at a UN biodiversity conference called COP15, the agreement contains 23 targets that countries must achieve within the decade. They include conserving at least 30 percent of all land and water on Earth by 2030 — the largest land and ocean conservation commitment in history — and shrinking subsidies for activities that harm nature, such as industrial fishing.
The agreement, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also commits rich countries to pay developing nations $30 billion a year by 2030 for conservation. That’s roughly a tripling of existing aid.www.vox.com/...
Environmental advocates say that this agreement could be our last chance to reverse the decline of nature. Ecosystems and the services they provide, such as pollination for food crops, are vanishing, as companies and governments bulldoze forests and prairies, and warm the Earth with greenhouse gases. One million species are now at risk of extinction and many wildlife populations have, on average, declined by nearly 70 percent in the last 50 years.
“The figures are terrifying,” Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, the world’s largest environmental organization, told Vox. “We’ve lost almost half of the forests, half of the coral reefs. It’s really, really bad.”
Biodiversity talks, like COP15, tend to draw far less attention than the big climate conferences — less than, say, COP27 in Egypt. Only a couple of heads of state showed up in Montreal and there were no A or B-list celebrities. Yet the agreement the conference produced is groundbreaking with wide-ranging implications for corporations, financial institutes, and governments.
“We have taken a great step forward in history today,” Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, said after the agreement was adopted, adding that COP15 is the most significant UN conference on biodiversity in history.
Now, attention turns to the question of whether nations will actually be able to achieve all 23 of the targets by the eight-year deadline, and what happens if they don’t. Unlike the Paris Agreement, the new biodiversity framework is not legally binding. www.vox.com/…
Countries agreed to nearly two dozen targets including conserving at least 30 percent of Earth within the decade
from Nature.org:
"The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, one of the highest rates in the world. Globally, the average carbon footprint is closer to 4 tons."
About 20% of greenhouse gases
in the US come from homes amp.cnn.com/…
HELP SAVE THE PLANET AND OURSELVES:
Turn out the lights when
not in use/use less
- Turn down the heat or AC
- vent out at night if cooler
- Avoid creating nighttime light pollution
- Don’t waste water
- Avoid burning wood (or other things), as wood fires are both pollutant and carcinogenic
- Don't use pesticides
- Limit your use of cars and planes (if possible)
- Don't use gas powered vehicles
- Take out grass and put in a garden or pond (or xeriscape )
- Mow, blow, and whack with electric or by hand
- Plant for the animals (bees, birds etc)
- Plant trees
- Don't micro manage yards, go wilder
- Try to use solar
- Take a bus, trolley or train
- Encourage your city/town to use electric buses
- Use energy efficient products or products that work on clean fuels
- Reduce dependence on non-biodegradable items
- Walk, bike or carpool
- Reuse items- give to Goodwill or Craig's list rather than dumping
- Cut down or cease eating meat
- Use reusable carry bags for grocerie; second choice, paper bags; not plastic
- Compost
- Save the bees
- Be informed
- Write your representative, sign petitions
- Elect pro-environment candidates and demand action
- Support the Green New Deal
- Get involved
- March
- Blog about the environment
- Control population
♻️ Happy Holidays from Climate Brief ♻️
Happy Recycling
♻️