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‘Humanity is waging war on nature’, says Guterres
The UN chief, António Guterres, has just wrapped up his comments to the Summit, in which he accused humanity of “waging war on nature”.
Deforestation, climate change and the conversion of wilderness for human food production are, said the UN chief, destroying Earth’s web of life: “we are part of that fragile web — and we need it to be healthy so we and future generations may thrive.”
One of the aims of this Summit is to secure increased ambition for biodiversity: the Secretary-General noted that, despite repeated commitments, efforts have not been sufficient to meet any of the global biodiversity targets set for this year.
By living in harmony with nature, he continued, the worst impacts of climate change can be avoided, for the benefit of people and the planet.
Mr. Guterres raised the encouraging prospects of nature-based solutions: forests, oceans and intact ecosystems are effective carbon sinks, for example, and healthy wetlands mitigate flooding.
Count natural resources as wealth
Economic systems, he continued, must account for and invest in nature which, currently, does not figure in countries’ calculations of wealth. The current system, he said, is weighted towards destruction, not preservation, but investing in nature would protect biodiversity and improve climate action, human health, and food security.
Protecting biodiversity and the environment can be a business opportunity: the Convention on Biological Diversity estimates that services from ecosystems make up between 50 and 90 per cent of the livelihoods of poor rural and forest-dwelling households, and poor communities can benefit from sustainable farming, eco-tourism and subsistence fishing.
The Secretary-General welcomed the commitments made in the Leader’s Pledge for Nature and coalitions such as the Campaign for Nature launched at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 which, he said, send a strong signal to raise political ambition in the run-up to COP15 of the Convention of Biological Diversity.
“Where effort has been made”, he declared “the benefits to our economies, human and planetary health are irrefutable.”
