At the beginning of January an new agreement was signed by 50 countries who pledged to protect 30% of the earths land and oceans. The intention of this agreement is to stem the flow of extinctions that human activity has been causing for the last few centuries.
The hope is that this agreement can form the basis of a larger agreement at the UN, building on the early commitments from nations such as Nigeria Pakistan Costa Rica Canada and many more.
A UN representative response could be summed up as ” great if commitments are delivered”.
One positive was a promise of billions of pounds for the green wall in Africa. The concept is to plant a belt of trees across the continent, in order to stop the spread of the Sahara.
There appears to be an increasing recognition that in order to halt climate change we must also save the natural world.
This I find more exciting! If we can combine climate change with wildlife destruction and solve them both together (it is increasingly clear this is not only a simple way of doing this, but possibly the only one) perhaps the world will truly engage in halting the attack on the natural world. Over the last decade the world has failed to meet a single target aimed at ending the destruction of the natural world and sustaining the ecosystems we rely on to survive. one caveat that has been mentioned by Oxfam among others, is that the funding for these projects must not steal aid that we are already giving. We must find additional money – having said that, there are likely to be many projects that engage on both fronts, allowing us to have an even greater impact on this problem.
