How to recoup ‘lost decade’
Divers swim above a bed of corals off Malaysia's Tioman island in the South China Sea.
What you need to know:
- The Aichi Targets aimed at tackling key drivers of biodiversity loss, including pollution, deforestation, habitat loss and increase public awareness.
More recently, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), in its “Living Planet 2020” dossier, reported that 70 per cent of wildlife had been lost since 1970.
On September 15, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) released the Global Biodiversity Outlook Five (GBO-5).
The scorecard highlights progress since 2010, when country delegations converging on Nagoya City in Aichi prefecture, Japan, agreed on a set of 20 targets to reduce biodiversity decline by 2020.
The Aichi Targets aimed at tackling key drivers of biodiversity loss, including pollution, deforestation, habitat loss and increase public awareness.
A key aim was to rally governments to put biodiversity — a key source of food, water and a contributor to human well-being — at the heart of national policies and development planning. The scorecard concludes that none of the targets will be fully met with only six likely to be partially met.
Out of the 60 monitoring criteria, only seven have been achieved. Additionally, 38 have shown some progress and 13 none while the status of two is unknown.
A 2014 UN report warned that the progress was insufficient. Last year, another showed that at least one million species were sliding towards extinction.
The impact is particularly serious in Africa. More recently, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), in its “Living Planet 2020” dossier, reported that 70 per cent of wildlife had been lost since 1970.
GBO-5 comes against a backdrop of ongoing consultations on a new set of targets for 2030 and beyond. The “post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” will be agreed upon by governments and stakeholders in Kunming, China, next year.
Countries must draw lessons from the failure to meet the Aichi Targets, the greatest being not allocating resources to stop degradation of ecosystems and fight climate change. While some progress was made in this regard, conservation funding remains paltry, mostly by foreign donors.
Biodiversity conservation must not remain the preserve of ecologists and park managers.
Mr Mwathe is the Africa policy and communications coordinator at BirdLife International. [email protected] @Ken_Birdlife
