Biodiversity Pact
By Dhurjati Mukherjee
In the realm of environment, which is obviously the centre point of focus in the world today, the climate and biodiversity conventions last year have been landmark agreements. A Loss and Damage Fund in the former and a target to bring at least 30 percent of terrestrial, inland water and coastal and marine areas under effective conservation and management by 2030 in the latter have enormous bearing on the environment.
Around 190 countries approved a sweeping UN agreement and to take a slew of other measures against rampant biodiversity loss which, if left unchecked, jeopardizes the planet’s food and water supplies as well as the existence of untold species around the world. It may be mentioned here that currently 17 percent and 10 percent of the world’s terrestrial and marine areas respectively are under protection. For India, the figures stand at 5.26 percent and 0.2 percent respectively. Less than 10 percent of terrestrial protected areas in the world are both protected and conserved.
The agreement, which is considered as equivalent to the Paris Agreement, comes as biodiversity is declining worldwide at rates never witnessed in human history. Scientists have projected that a million plants and animals are at risk of extinction, many within decades. The deal lays out a suite of 23 conservation targets. Countries also agreed to manage the remaining 70 per cent of the planet to avoid losing areas of high importance to biodiversity and to ensure that big businesses disclose biodiversity risks and impacts.
This is indeed a highly significant agreement as it would go a long way to halt and reverse the destruction of nature. It is understood that the biodiversity summit has agreed to four goals and 23 targets. The goals include protecting 30 per cent of the world’s land, water and marine areas by 2030, as well as the mobilization, by 2030, of at least US $200 billion annually in domestic and international biodiversity-related funding from all sources, both public and private.
There is also a pledge to reduce subsidies deemed harmful to nature by at least $500 billion by 2030, while having developed countries commit to providing developing countries with at least $20 billion per year by 2025, and $30 billion per year by 2030.
One is inclined to refer here to the Living Planet Report 2022, the most authentic study of trends in the realm of biodiversity revealed an average 69 percent decline in species population since 1970. During this period, it is reported that half of the world’s corals have been lost and are losing forest areas the size of 27 football fields every minute.
The Minister of Environment and Forests informed the Rajya Sabha in mid-December that 73 species in the country, including nine species of mammals, 18 birds, 26 reptiles and 20 amphibians are critically endangered, up from 47 in 2011. Obviously, rapid global warming and unprecedented rate of extinction are two of the basic reasons for this state of affairs.
“In some locations, it can mean the loss of the very land where coastal communities live,” the report pointed out. Around 137 square kilometres of the Sundarbans mangrove forest in India and Bangladesh has been eroded since 1985, reducing land and ecosystem services for many of the 10 million people who live there, the analysis showed. “Climate change in India will impact key areas, such as water resources, agriculture, natural ecosystems, health and the food chain,” Ravi Singh, Secretary-General and Chief Executive, WWF India, had rightly observed in analyzing the report.
It is a well-known fact that climate change coupled with habitat loss, pollution and development have hammered the world’s biodiversity, with one estimate in 2019 warning that a million plant and animal species face extinction within decades — a rate of loss 1,000 times greater than expected. It may be news that humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely, and one out of five people of the world’s eight billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said.
It is thus obvious that experts have voiced the need for an all-inclusive collective approach that can put us on a more sustainable path and ensures that the costs and benefits from our actions are socially just and equitably shared. Climate change and biodiversity loss are not only environmental issues, but economic, development, security, social, moral and ethical issues too. As has been emphasized again and again with statistical data, industrialised countries are responsible for most environmental degradation but it is developing nations that are disproportionately impacted by biodiversity loss.
The WWF identified six key threats to biodiversity — agriculture, hunting, logging, pollution, invasive species and climate change — to highlight ‘threat hotspots’ for terrestrial vertebrates. A nature-positive future needs transformative, game-changing shifts in how we produce, how we consume, how we govern and what we finance,” highlighted the Living Planet Report. The present agreement is thus a fall-out of the report as it has set targets which needs to be achieved in the coming years.
However, though biodiversity loss cannot be allowed to continue, there is another aspect of the problem that also needs to be seriously considered. There are estimates by economists suggesting that the carrying capacity of the planet is about five billion humans at the most, without irreversibly running down natural capital. Other estimates of the carrying capacity of the planet for humans, average around eight billion. But we have steadily surpassed the figure and providing food thus becomes a big challenge, specially for the populous countries of the Third World like China and India.
There is thus a need to balance preservation of biodiversity with increased food production in the coming years. Neglecting biodiversity cannot be the answer to the requirements of human beings and a judicious approach is called for in this regard. As far as India is concerned, there is a need to concentrate on biodiversity conservation while also exploring ways and means with the help of technological innovations to increase agricultural productivity, specially in areas where it is below the national average. Sooner the better. — INFA