JOIN USThe latest UN Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 and the WWF Living Planet Report 2020 highlight the serious damage done to biodiversity in the world in the past and continues to be done now. The UN report has pointed out that the world has failed to achieve even one of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets signed by 170 countries through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The targets were set in 2010 at a historic meet in Aichi, Japan.
The post-2020 framework of the convention is being worked out now for adoption at its next meeting in Japan in 2021. It will lay down new targets but, unfortunately, this will be from a position of absolute failure and non-performance during this decade and the past decade.
The Aichi targets included a number of specific measures under some strategic goals like addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, reducing the direct pressures on biodiversity, safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity, enhancing the benefits to all from biodiversity and ecosystem services and participatory planning, knowledge management and capacity-building. No country can claim any credit for satisfactory performance on them. Instead, every day, one or more species of flora and fauna may be disappearing from the earth.
The UN had already warned that one million species might disappear within the next few decades. The planet has already seen five big extinctions; the sixth may be happening now, this time driven by human activities. The Living Planet Report has noted that the earth’s wildlife population has declined by an average of 68% among monitored vertebrate species from 1970 to 2016. Clearing forests for agricultural space was the primary cause of the decline.
While population growth, destruction of forests, intensive agriculture, unrestrained industrial activity, expansion of infrastructure and modern facilities and amenities for life and overconsumption have mainly contributed to the shrinkage of biodiversity, awareness about its crucial role is yet to sink into human consciousness. All the causes are linked with development, but development will be real only if it is sustainable.
All life forms, from the smallest to the biggest, and including plants, animals, birds and other species, form a grand and interconnected chain, and the loss of even one impacts the whole. Over a period, the extinctions gain a critical mass which is enough to threaten the survival of others, and we are fast advancing to that moment. A new and more effective CBD needs to be formulated, and governments, communities, organisations and individuals should consider it their responsibility to implement it in order to save ourselves from certain disaster.