Plea for funding to halt nature’s dangerous decline
Birds drink water from a tap in Ngulia Rhino base, Tsavo National Park in Taita Taveta County on September 5, 2020.
What you need to know:
- The natural world is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. One million plant and animal species now face extinction, many within decades, and 60 per cent of terrestrial wildlife populations have been lost in the last 50 years.
- Rainforests throughout the world are being cleared at a rate of four football fields per minute.
Africa may lose half of its bird and animal species, 20-30 per cent of the productivity of its lakes and significant numbers of its plant species by 2100.
This was revealed by government leaders and experts from across the continent attending the Africa Nature Finance Forum held last month in Kigali, Rwanda, where they called for urgent increase in financing to protect the world’s biodiversity.
“One of the key elements is the mobilisation of predictable and sustainable resources. This is why we need to think about innovative and sustainable finance for nature,” said Lee White, Minister of Water, Forests, the Sea and Environment, Gabon.
The natural world is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. One million plant and animal species now face extinction, many within decades, and 60 per cent of terrestrial wildlife populations have been lost in the last 50 years. Rainforests throughout the world are being cleared at a rate of four football fields per minute.
To address this crisis, governments, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, environmental organisations and businesses are working to develop a new framework to guide biodiversity conservation for the next decade known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
This global agreement will be finalised at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity set to take place in Montreal, Canada, in December 2022. However, without sufficient financing, addressing the biodiversity crisis will not be possible, and this critical global agreement may be elusive.
According to experts, loss of birds and mammals has an undeniable impact to the ecosystem, thus affecting humans directly. “For instance, birds are under-appreciated pollinators, which means they play a major role in fertilisation in plant species. If they are extinct, it means that production of some plants will be affected, and eventually affect food security,” explains Dr Siro Masinde, principle research scientist at the National Museums of Kenya.
“Birds, like vultures, also play a cleaning role in the ecosystem. They exclusively eat dead animal carcasses, thus they are effective at removing pathogens and toxins in the environment. If they are no longer in the ecosystem, it means we become exposed to diseases,” he adds.
There are key drivers to loss of biodiversity. One of them, he says, is loss of habitat. “For instance, cutting of trees and destruction of forests where species that call such an ecosystem home, are forced to leave.”
He also points out the issue of invasive species which after being introduced in a certain ecosystem, they dominate and choke the original inhabitants to an extent of forcing extinction. “There is also overexploitation like overfishing, which deprives an area of certain species,” he adds.
