LOSS OF SPECIES DIVERSITY DRIVERS
“Progress has been made, but it has been insufficient to address the underlying drivers of loss: climate change and exploitation, which are driven by broader consumption patterns,” he adds. Although many nations successfully mobilized financial resources to aid biodiversity conservation, the funds were undermined by factors such as subsidies supporting fossil fuels and overfishing, Cooper says. “We need to think about what we can do to help countries get a faster start and build on the momentum we have now,” Cooper adds. By mid-decade, countries were finally making gains but not enough to meet the deadline. “Frankly, we lost some time at the start of the decade as countries developed their own national targets,” Cooper says. In light of such opposing interests, David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity and an author of the new GBO, says the outcomes of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets are, unfortunately, “in line with what we expected,” particularly when considering the fourth GBO, released in 2014, which warned of insufficient progress. And although China has made great strides in moving away from fossil fuels, its $6-trillion development project, the Belt and Road Initiative, poses serious risk to the flora and fauna inside and outside its borders. will officially exit that agreement on November 4, and the country has never ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. The failure to halt biodiversity loss draws stark parallels with nations’ lack of political will to keep global warming below an increase of two degrees Celsius, as was pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement. But experts say the participating countries have failed, in large part, because they have struggled to address conservation while focusing on their economies and rising populations. The Aichi goals to counter losses were equally diverse. Many human activities can shrink biodiversity, including deforestation, pollution and the introduction of invasive species. But according to the just released fifth edition of the U.N.’s Global Biodiversity Outlook ( GBO), the international community as a whole has failed to meet even a single biodiversity target by the deadline, and no nation has successfully met all 20 within its own borders. Ultimately, 170 countries and regions agreed to the targets and to create their own national conservation strategies that mirrored or related to the Aichi goals. Without such intervention, according to the U.N., roughly one million species could disappear within several decades, widening what scientists have coined the Holocene extinction: the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, driven by human activity. Their aim was to protect the world’s imperiled flora and fauna by 2020.
The 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets were established under the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity at a conference in Japan in 2010.
LOSS OF SPECIES DIVERSITY SERIES
Global efforts to address the steep, ongoing loss of biodiversity through a series of specified targets have failed, according to a dire assessment released by the United Nations today.
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