Some good news on the biodiversity front.

A recent article from Associated Press (AP) reported that the UN is gearing up for a push to save the planet’s biodiversity.

Here are a couple of highlights:

• In large part because of biologist E.O. Wilson’s call in his book, Half-Earth[1], to protect substantial zones of our planet’s vital habitats, nearly all the world’s countries kicked off a United Nations-backed meeting aimed at preventing the loss of biodiversity — seen as critical to avoiding the extinction of many vulnerable species, the emergence of pathogens like the coronavirus, and the damage to both lives and livelihoods of people around the world, indigenous peoples in particular.
• The two-week meeting of over 190 countries on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, after a two-year delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will be the last gathering of its kind before a major conference in the coming months in Kunming, China, that will try to adopt an international agreement on protecting biodiversity.

“We have this one goal, which is to bend the curve on biodiversity loss and really to build that shared future to live in harmony with nature in the long term,” the convention’s executive secretary, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, told reporters...

In order to accomplish the UN’s goal the plan, at least in part, is to protect 30% of our planet’s land and sea by 2030 and 50% by 2050. Of course, this doesn’t mean removing people from a continent or two—that would be impossible. Habitats can be rescued by piecemeal protection on a global scale. As it stands now, about 15% of Earth’s terrestrial habitats are already protected.
 
A great example of how landowners can permanently protect vital habitat in our own state is through the Land Trust for Louisiana whose parent organization is the Land Trust Alliance.

Land trusts offer permanent protection through conservation easements where landowners don’t give up their property ownership or use, and they get to leave behind a living legacy. I see Land Trusts as being vital for the protection of private land, helping us reach the first landmark, 30%, and onward to 50% by 2050. After all, about 60% of land in the U.S. is in private ownership.

​If land and their vital animal and plant communities are not legally protected they will, sooner or later, be destroyed. That is sadly a law of human nature. Nature is sexy, but greed trumps nature every time.
 
[Partial source: UN gathering gears up for push to save planet’s biodiversity By JAMEY KEATEN]
​
[1] Ref: Liveright, New York-London 2016
​

---

Conservationist and retired medical doctor (pathology), Johnny Armstrong and his wife Karen and Opal (k-nine) live within a Nature Conservancy protected old-growth forest and woodland near Ruston, Louisiana. Shadowshine is his first novel..