Construction of controversial Amazon basin dam facilities
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The amount of land and water with formally protected biodiversity has increased by less than 0.5 percent since 2020, leaving the world far from reaching its goal of protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030.
“While some progress has been made over the past four years, it is still not moving fast enough,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said in a press release.
In 2022, countries agreed to a landmark agreement to halt biodiversity loss at the COP15 summit in Montreal, formally targeting 30% of all terrestrial and inland waters and 30% of oceans by the end of 2010. promised to protect. This is considered the minimum protection needed to avoid extinction of ecosystems around the world, and protections would require roughly doubling land area and tripling marine protected areas.
As countries gather for the COP16 Biodiversity Summit in Colombia, the latest official information reveals that the world is far behind the 30×30 goal.
Currently, 17.6 percent of terrestrial and inland waters and 8.4 percent of oceans are formally protected, according to figures compiled by the United Nations Environment Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That leaves a land gap the size of Brazil and Australia combined, and a protected area the size of the Indian Ocean still needed at sea to reach the goal.
There are other issues besides the total area protected. A third of the areas considered most important for biodiversity have no formal protection, and some ecosystems, particularly those in the deep sea, are not included in protected areas. Few protected areas are interconnected, and only a few have been assessed to see if their protection is working.
This “reveals the reality of global inaction,” said Brian O’Donnell of the environmental nonprofit Campaign for Nature. “To fix this, governments need to treat the biodiversity crisis as an emergency.”
Other reports from the COP16 summit also highlighted the dire state of biodiversity. For example, the first global assessment of tree biodiversity found that 38 percent of species are at risk of extinction. As the conference continues until the end of this week, countries are also expected to make new commitments on protected areas and conservation funding.
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