Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.
The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.
For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
Editor’s note: Environmental nonprofit groups — which include land conservation, land trusts, and wildlife protection organizations — receive just 2% of all charitable donations, research suggests.Though small conservation groups are typically efficient about converting funds into effective, on-the-ground projects, most conservation funding goes to the largest, multi-national organizations.
“The simplest and most immediate way concerned parties with some resources, whether an individual or institution, can help is to donate more to small wildlife conservation organizations and volunteer when and where it is logistically possible,” a new op-ed argues. This post is a commentary by Gail Koelln.
More funds needed for small nonprofit conservation groups
I have worked as a grant writing professional for about 24 years and am also the part-time co-director of a small, U.S.-based wildlife conservation nonprofit called One Earth Conservation (OEC) that focuses on the conservation of wild parrots in the Americas. As a grant writing consultant, I serve nonprofit clients in a variety of fields, such as animal welfare, the environment, arts, youth education and development, health, and serving people with disabilities.With this unique perspective, and at a time of massive biodiversity loss, I believe it’s urgent that small and nimble wildlife conservation nonprofits receive more support. Yet, I have noted many striking things about the wildlife conservation field. It is, arguably, one of the most important issues needing attention in a world where a sixth mass extinction event is already underway.Yet, funding in this sector is pathetically paltry, with limited numbers of foundations and corporations supporting conservation as a way to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Even government funding is mostly restricted to grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and small departments within local state environmental agencies, with very few exceptions. The silver lining is that government grants can provide substantial funding that most other funders do not offer.
In addition, Allison Smith of Neon Onewrote the following about how much individuals in the U.S. donated to environmental and animal welfare organizations in 2021:
“Giving USA found that just 3% of all giving went to environmental and animal welfare organizations in 2021. Other research suggests that environmental nonprofits — which include land conservation, land trusts, and wildlife protection organizations — received about 2% of charitable donations.”
This is the second lowest percentage of giving of all categories (just above giving to individuals) that includes arts, culture, and humanities; international affairs; health; public-society benefit; grant making foundations; human services; education; and religion.
I have also noticed that there is little to no capacity building support for smaller wildlife conservation organizations, which is in sharp contrast to, for example, small arts organizations. Throughout the U.S. there are many local arts councils that provide small grants, training, and other capacity building resources in support of small arts and culture nonprofits. This type of support, whether financial or not, can help small arts groups to grow and become self-sustaining. Unfortunately, I have encountered nothing of the sort for wildlife conservation organizations such as OEC.
When funders do provide financial support for wildlife conservation, the vast majority of that funding goes to larger, more established organizations. Small groups barely stand a chance of getting even a meager grant from many funders. And government applications require a great deal of sweat and tears to complete and administer, which is more difficult for small organizations with few staff members.
Smaller wildlife conservation organizations can often be more nimble than larger organizations that usually have larger bureaucratic structures. Our impact relative to the lesser dollars we have to work with can be greater. Investing more funding into smaller wildlife conservation organizations can result in a greater “bang for the buck.”
Using OEC as an example, it is important to know that wild parrots are native to five continents and they even live wild in Europe and the U.S. as introduced species. If expanded, OEC’s community conservation work could positively impact biodiversity loss globally. Our projects not only help reduce the illegal wildlife trade and habitat loss, but also improve animal welfare and empower Indigenous and other marginalized communities. With an annual budget of about $240,000, OEC currently partners with local people in six countries in the Americas.
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner, the other co-director of OEC, says, “It doesn’t take much capital to invest in social capital. It’s an infinite resource that keeps giving across generations, cultures, and species.” Our emotional, social, and organizational intelligence trainings are infused with conservation theory. Implementation of what they learn inspires participants to not only want to protect their parrots, but also other wildlife and their environment, and poachers are transforming into protectors.
We have been testing for three years novel, online Parrot Conservation Corps (PCC) trainings in English and Spanish to teach our conservation methods and create mini teams to sprout new projects. Our most recent PCC engaged new leaders in eight countries and provided them with small grants for their projects and stipends when their work was completed. We have found the PCC to be a very nimble way to influence large swaths of people and seed new conservationists and projects. These activities can be replicated by reaching out to more communities, co-organizing new PCC cohorts, and training other NGOs on our process.
We often dream about what we could do with a larger budget, as many small nonprofits do, and I know we would benefit greatly from capacity building support in areas such as tracking financial transactions in the field where there is erratic internet access. If humanity wants to preserve and restore biodiversity globally, then looking to and supporting wildlife conservation organizations of all sizes is a large part of the answer. It remains an open question how to best change the global funding paradigm for nonprofits in general, as it isn’t working well in many fields, not only in wildlife conservation. I don’t claim to have the answer, but at least I can encourage more of us to discuss the possibilities.
In the meantime, the simplest and most immediate way concerned parties with some resources, whether an individual or institution, can help is to donate more to small wildlife conservation organizations and volunteer when and where it is logistically possible. OEC is doing our part by working daily to increase the capacity of our partners on the ground in the countries in which we work. As we support them financially, we also regularly provide guidance and training to strengthen their ability to eventually continue their community conservation work on their own. Ultimately, that is the best hope for staunching the open wound of mass extinctions on Earth.
Editor’s Note: We all know that industrial technology is not good for the natural world. This is what makes any form of industrial technology practically unsustainable in the long run, and ecocidal by nature. The following article describes the impact of wireless technology on various aspects of wildlife.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
There is growing evidence that our addiction to cell phones could be impacting brain functionality and be the cause of stress, anxiety, insomnia, and a lack of attention and focus.
A 2017 report found that human beings are not the only living things to be affected by society’s increasing dependence on wireless technology. Mammals, birds, insects, and even plants are likely being harmed by the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emanating from Wi-Fi, cell phone towers, broadcast transmitters, and power lines, according to an analysis of 97 peer-reviewed studies conducted by EKLIPSE, a biodiversity and ecosystem project funded by the European Union.
Impact on Birds
The researchers said that “evidence is accumulating that mammals (e.g., bats and mice) have a magnetic sense” that is affected by radio-frequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMR). Birds in particular may be highly susceptible. The researchers found that even weak magnetic fields in the radio frequency range can disrupt birds’ magnetoreception, their ability to use the Earth’s magnetic fields to orient themselves and find their way home.
Homing pigeons are well-known for their magnetoreception, but this sense has also been detected in other animals, like red foxes, and there is evidence that even large mammals like deer use the planet’s magnetic fields to sense direction. A number of invertebrates, including worms, mollusks, and fruit flies also use this ability.
“When you start to observe and realize that swallows and house martins no longer nest in towns and villages, when you realize that the sparrows have all disappeared, that in the evenings there are no bats flying in the dusk and that you no longer hear owls hooting, then you will begin to know what effect microwaves from cell towers and antennas are having on the environment,” said one commenter to a One World News article about the report.
Impact on Plants
The report also concluded that EMR can also alter the metabolism of plants, causing “significant changes … demonstrated at cellular and molecular levels.” The authors noted that even a low-level of exposure to EMR “caused a rapid increase in stress-related transcript accumulation in tomato [plants].” Transcription is the first phase in the expression of a gene, in which a specific segment of DNA is copied into RNA.
More Research Needed
The authors said that their findings indicate “an urgent need to strengthen the scientific basis of the knowledge on EMR and their potential impacts on wildlife,” specifically calling out the “need to base future research on sound, high-quality, replicable experiments so that credible, transparent and easily accessible evidence can inform society and policy-makers to make decisions and frame their policies.”
The UK charity Buglife, dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates, (which proposed the analysis) warned that there wasn’t enough research to determine limits to EMR pollution. The group said that “serious impacts on the environment could not be ruled out” and urged that 5G transmitters should not be placed near street lights, which attract nocturnal insects like moths, nor in areas near wildlife.
Credible Risk
Buglife CEO Matt Shardlow, who served on the expert steering group of the report, warned in 2018 that “there is a credible risk that 5G could impact significantly on wildlife.” He added:
“We apply limits to all types of pollution to protect the habitability of our environment, but as yet, even in Europe, the safe limits of electromagnetic radiation have not been determined, let alone applied. This is a classic case of out of sight out of mind, just because humans cannot see electromagnetic radiation this does not mean that animals cannot ‘see’ the pollution or be significantly impacted at a neural or cellular level. A proper research program and clear policy measures are long overdue.”
5G Network Threat
Shardlow specifically warned of the rollout of 5th-generation wireless systems, or 5G networks, and called on telecommunications firms to research the impact of their wireless technology on wildlife and make their findings public. In May 2018, Qatar became the first nation in the world to have a 5G network. The worldwide commercial launch of 5G occurred in 2020.
The report authors also said that strong EMR fields increase the temperature in living tissue, but the intensity needed to induce such heating is “not experienced by wildlife (so far).” It’s notable that they left the door open to this other potential emerging threat, as cell phone adoption rates are steadily rising globally. The number of smartphone users worldwide is forecast to grow from 2.1 billion in 2016 to around 2.5 billion in 2019, according to Statista, a market research firm. That means more cell towers—and more EMR being emitted into the environment.
Scientists Make Appeal to United Nations
The report comes on the heels of a 2015 appeal to the United Nations, signed by more than 200 scientists from 41 countries, urging the international body to address the risks posed electromagnetic fields (EMF), physical fields produced by objects charged by electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation. Specifically, the scientists want the UN to “recognize that EMF exposure is an emerging health and environmental crisis that requires a high priority response.”
“Biologists and scientists are not being heard on the committees that set safety standards,” said Dr. Martin Blank of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University and signatory of the appeal, in a video address on the website of International EMF Alliance, a group founded in 2009 that disseminates information to policymakers and health authorities about the potential effects of electromagnetic radiation. “The biological facts are being ignored and as a result, the safety limits are much too high. They are not protective.”
Impact of Long-Term Low-Frequency Exposure
Though evidence is mounting that humans may also be physiologically affected by EMF, the jury is still out on the impact of long-term low-frequency exposure. The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded in 2016 that “current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields.” However, the agency does admit that “some gaps in knowledge about biological effects exist and need further research.”
“Some of the fears are based on a report issued in 2011 by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The agency had gathered in Lyon, France, to discuss scientific studies surrounding the question of whether there’s a relationship between radio-frequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) and cancer. After intense deliberations, and to the great surprise of the world at large, experts decided to classify RF-EMF waves emitted by cell phones, cell towers, and Wi-Fi networks as category 2B, indicating a ‘possible human carcinogen.’”
EMF Safety Limits May Be Inadequate
For Dr. Blank and his colleagues raising the warning flag to the United Nations, the evidence is clear. “Cellphones, tablets, Wi-Fi, etc. Putting it bluntly, they are damaging the living cells in our bodies and killing many of us prematurely,” he said in his video address. “Rising exposure to electromagnetic radiation is a global problem. The World Health Organization and international standard-setting bodies are not acting to protect the public’s health and well-being. International exposure guidelines for electromagnetic fields must be strengthened.”
In his video address in 2016, Dr. Blank suggested that the current EMF safety limits may be inadequate due to the influence of the telecommunications industry on the policymakers. “More protection will probably result from full disclosure of possible conflicts of interest between regulators and industry,” he said.
“We have created something that is harming us, and it is getting out of control. Before Edison’s lightbulb, there was very little electromagnetic radiation in our environment. The levels today are very many times higher than natural background levels and are growing rapidly because of all the new devices that emit this radiation. An example that a lot of us have right now in our pockets is the cellphone.”
Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory, where he is the environment and animal rights editor. He is also a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food, and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health and Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Asia Times, Pressenza, and EcoWatch, among others. He volunteers with New York City Pigeon Rescue Central.
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Editor’s note: Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with the Karen people and the Revolution against the military junta in Myanmar. We will keep it in the headlines to help them raise their voice as we do with all land protectors of Mother Earth. “Until the end of the world we will not give up our efforts…we will not let it happen.”
The Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar contains an expanse of rainforest, ocean, and mangroves where a range of wildlife – from tigers and elephants to tapirs – roam, and the Indigenous Karen people consider themselves stewards of this richness.
In 2012, the Karen and the Myanmar military signed a ceasefire to end 70 years of war in their territory, allowing the Indigenous communities an opportunity to develop new institutions, campaigns, and programs to conserve their resources and forests from destruction by outside interests.
That ended with the military coup of 2021: “Attacks by the military on Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders means that the forests are at risk – and for this reason we want to say to the world ‘this coup doesn’t just affect our country, but the future of the globe.’”
This article is a commentary, it reflects the views of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
The Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar is a beautiful and rich expanse of rainforest, ocean, and mangroves where we still have wild tigers and elephants, and where the forest provides all that we need in life. It is my home land. Our Indigenous communities depend on the forest for food, water, medicine, and our forests depend on Indigenous communities, who manage, conserve and protect them with great care.
The Myanmar military coup risks all our recent progress after 10 years of rebuilding our lives, following 70 years of civil war. Our people plan to fight to protect our lands and win back our lives. We want the rest of the world to understand why.
Our Territory and Our Struggle
Though it is a rich, green land, our territory and our communities have also been terrorized and traumatized by decades of armed conflict at the hands of the Myanmar military. In 1948, our Karen people began our fight for greater autonomy, for self-determination, and for our basic rights against fascist oppression by the Myanmar military. The resulting civil war saw villages burned, people were killed, raped and tortured, and over 80,000 were displaced into the forest and along the Thai-Myanmar border. Relentless oppression of our people and our Karen identity meant that we never had a chance to develop, to forge our own destiny, to manage and protect our territory.
Malayan tapirs are one of many threatened mammal species present in Tanintharyi’s forests. Image by seth m via Flickr/Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In 2012, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the Myanmar military signed a ceasefire agreement, bringing to a halt 70 years of brutal civil war in our territory. During this time of relative peace, communities were able to re-establish their livelihoods, manage and protect their lands and forests, participate in political processes, and finally live and breathe without the fear of being shot, abducted, and tortured. We were able to mobilize our communities, develop new institutions, and create new ideas for a collective and peaceful future.
While the ceasefire stopped the bullets flying and the soldiers destroying our villages, we experienced a barrage of new challenges. Suddenly new laws, concessions, development projects, and national parks threatened to confiscate our lands – the lands that we had already been displaced from so many times before. 1.7 million acres of land were handed to crony companies for oil palm concessions, 3.5 million acres were earmarked for the Ridge to Reef project, a large-scale conservation program funded by the GEF, and other parts of our region were taken for special economic zones, infrastructure development, and mining operations. For us, it felt like the rug was being pulled from under our feet, just when we could finally stand.
In response to these new challenges, Indigenous communities and civil society organizations started to create their own conservation areas – proving their ability to conserve their own resources and protect their lands and forests from those who wished to destroy them. Communities across the region mobilized, strengthened their customary tenure systems, and documented their boundaries and land use systems. We showed policy makers how we govern our territories, and sought to have our rights recognized, and respected. We built networks with Indigenous communities throughout the country, creating new spaces of inter-ethnic solidarity, and started to join international platforms with other Indigenous activists from across the globe. We campaigned against mega projects with great success – our campaigns halted mining operations, suspended palm oil concessions and cancelled conservation projects. We knew that united, we could win.
Together with my community, we developed new visions for what our territory should look like, and how conservation and development should be carried out. We developed a grassroots alternative to the Ridge to Reef Project, a Landscape of Life that proved that communities were best placed to protect and conserve our territory, and that a peaceful future would include harmony between our Karen people and their forests and biodiversity.
Our futures are again uncertain
On February 1st 2021, however, the military staged a coup, arrested members of the elected NLD government, and brutally cracked down on resistance. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) site, over 1,000 people have been killed and nearly 7,000 have been detained or arrested, and the military has started brutal campaigns in ethnic areas once more, dropping bombs on our forests and burning down our villages.
Under the military regime, we cannot protect our land, forest and biodiversity – those who attempt to defend their territories will be detained, tortured, or killed – and we cannot protect ourselves. Environmental defenders have been targeted by the military for the work that they have done protecting their lands from theft and destruction by military companies and their cronies. Recently, Kyaw Min Htut, a forest defender from Sagaing region was arrested and beaten, along with his family, because of his leading role in organizing his community and protecting surrounding natural resources.
Further, in Tanintharyi Region the offices of many environmental civil society groups have been raided and many environmental defenders have had to flee, hiding from arrest or murder at the hands of the junta. Defending forests and the environment in Myanmar in 2021 is a crime punishable by death.
Despite attacks by the military and decades of destructive development, we still have a lot of forest in our Indigenous territories in Myanmar. Without forests, we cannot survive, and without us, our forests cannot survive. We contribute a lot to climate change mitigation internationally, and our efforts to protect our forests are clear. Attacks by the military on Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders means that the forests are at risk – and for this reason we want to say to the world ‘this coup doesn’t just affect our country, but the future of the globe.’
Since the coup, our divided nation has become united. We have united in revolution against the military who has stolen our futures from us. We stand together to change the path of history, and until the end of the world we will not give up our efforts. Over 400,000 workers have joined the civil disobedience movement – going on permanent strike, youth from across the country have joined the armed resistance, and ethnic armed groups are continuing the struggle to defend their territories – together we cannot and must not lose. Our fight is for the future of our people, our nation, our forests, our world.
While our struggle has disappeared from international headlines, we call upon international governments, global social movements, international Indigenous organizations and the international community to stand in solidarity with us and help us to raise our voice – the world depends upon it.
If we do not speak out, our futures will be lost, and our forests will be destroyed. Until the end of the world, we will not let it happen.
Esther Wah (real name redacted for safety) is an Indigenous Karen activist.
Editor’s note: The plan to protect the world’s wildlife (as well as the Paris Agreement) falls short because 1) Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization (Premise one), 2) The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life (Premise ten), and, if you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature (Premise 20). The only way to protect the world’s wildlife and the climate is to bring down the global economy.
It’s no secret the world’s wildlife is in dire straits. New data shows a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest killed more than 1 billion sea creatures in June, while Australia’s devastating bushfires of 2019-2020 killed or displaced 3 billion animals. Indeed, 1 million species face extinction worldwide.
These numbers are overwhelming, but a serious global commitment can help reverse current tragic rates of biodiversity loss.
This week the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity released a draft of its newest ten-year global plan. Often considered to be the Paris Agreement of biodiversity, the new plan aims to galvanise planetary scale action to achieve a world “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.
But if the plan goes ahead in its current form, it will fall short in safeguarding the wonder of our natural world. This is primarily because it doesn’t legally bind nations to it, risking the same mistakes made by the last ten-year plan, which didn’t stop biodiversity decline.
A lack of binding obligations
The Convention on Biological Diversity is a significant global agreement and almost all countries are parties to it. This includes Australia, which holds the unwanted record for the greatest number of mammal extinctions since European colonisation.
However, the convention is plagued by the lack of binding obligations. Self-reporting to the convention secretariat is the only thing the convention makes countries do under international law.
All other, otherwise sensible, provisions of the convention are limited by a series of get-out-of-jail clauses. Countries are only required to implement provisions “subject to national legislation” or “as far as possible and as appropriate”.
The convention has used non-binding targets since 2000 in its attempt to address global biodiversity loss. But this has not worked.
The ten-year term of the previous targets, the Aichi Targets, came to an end in 2020, and included halving habitat loss and preventing extinction. But these, alongside most other Aichi targets, were not met.
In the new draft targets, extinction is no longer specifically named — perhaps relegated to the too hard basket. Pollution appears again in the new targets, and now includes a specific mention of eliminating plastic pollution.
Is this really a Paris-style agreement?
I wish. Calling the plan a Paris-style agreement suggests it has legal weight, when it doesn’t.
The fundamental difference between the biodiversity plan and the Paris Agreement is that binding commitments are a key component of the Paris Agreement. This is because the Paris Agreement is the successor of the legally binding Kyoto Protocol.
The final Paris Agreement legally compels countries to state how much they will reduce their emissions by. Nations are then expected to commit to increasingly ambitious reductions every five years.
If they don’t fulfill these commitments, countries could be in breach of international law. This risks damage to countries’ reputation and international standing.
The door remains open for some form of binding commitment to emerge from the biodiversity convention. But negotiations to date have included almost no mention of this being a potential outcome.
So what else needs to change?
Alongside binding agreements, there are many other aspects of the convention’s plan that must change. Here are three:
First, we need truly transformative measures to tackle the underlying economic and social causes of biodiversity loss.
The plan’s first eight targets are directed at minimising the threats to biodiversity, such as the harvesting and trade of wild species, area-based conservation, climate change and pollution.
While this is important, the plan also needs to call out and tackle dominant worldviews which equate continuous economic growth with human well-being. The first eight targets cannot realistically be met unless we address the economic causes driving these threats: materialism, unsustainable production and over-consumption.
Second, the plan needs to put Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, science, governance, rights and voices front and centre.
An abundance of evidence shows lands managed by Indigenous and local communities have significantly better biodiversity outcomes. But biodiversity on Indigenous lands is decreasing and with it the knowledge for continued sustainable management of these ecosystems.
Indigenous peoples and local communities have “observer status” within the convention’s discussions, but references to Indigenous “knowledges” and “participation” in the draft plan don’t go much further than in the Aichi Targets.
Third, there must be cross-scale collaborations as global economic, social and environmental systems are connected like never before.
The unprecedented movement of people and goods and the exchange of money, information and resources means actions in one part of the globe can have significant biodiversityimpacts in faraway lands. The draft framework does not sufficiently appreciate this.
For example, global demand for palm oil contributes to deforestation of orangutan habitat in Borneo. At the same time, consumer awareness and social media campaigns in countries far from palm plantations enable distant people to help make a positive difference.
The road to Kunming
The next round of preliminary negotiations of the draft framework will take place virtually from August 23 to September 3 2021. And it’s likely final in-person negotiations in Kunming, China will be postponed until 2022.
It’s not all bad news, there is still much to commend in the convention’s current draft plan.
For example, the plan facilitates connections with other global processes, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It recognises the contributions of biodiversity to, for instance, nutrition and food security, echoing Sustainable Development Goal 2 of “zero hunger”.
But if non-binding targets didn’t work in the past, then why does the convention think this time will be any different?
A further set of unmet biodiversity goals and targets in 2030 is an unacceptable scenario. At the same time, there’s no point aiming at targets that merely maintain the status quo.
We can change the current path of mass extinction. This requires urgent, concerted and transformative action towards a thriving planet for people and nature.
