03/03/2021
Why we need a planetary conservation movement?
The scientific consensus concludes that we need at least half of Earth’s land and seas wild and intact to maintain ecological security and the planetary life support systems upon which we all depend. The reason for this is that ecosystems lose functionality precipitously when more than approximately half a landscape (or in the case of fragile landscapes, like rainforests, 20-30%) is lost. Currently, on a planetary-scale, we are on the precipice of the half threshold – and we may have already dipped under it.
Abundant wildlands and marine areas are huge (and the most cost-effective) carbon storage facilities, utterly essential for our achievement of the Paris Agreement targets that are necessary to secure our future. As we destroy nature to expand our industries and communities, we simultaneously diminish our ability to prevent pandemics and stabilize the climate.
Protecting nature at a global scale is an unprecedented challenge. And regrettably, policies are too often extremely resistant to science.
Transforming outdated laws and the systems supporting them requires movements; they require constituencies and coalitions; they demand we pay heed to the cultural forces that attract and sustain collective action. Conservation science is at its most powerful when it informs us of what we must do, but cultural knowledge is essential for encouraging us to actually do it. And until conservation prioritizes the latter, we are unlikely to create the systemic change needed to effectively implement the former.
The realization that our problems are not rooted in the environment, but in society, dawns on the cusp of a critically important decade in which we might still have time to stabilize the climate and halt extinction. As this occurs, though, nature conservation is lacking in the social science and humanities experts required to strike at the heart of our broken relationship with nature.
crdts- https://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/news/putting-people-and-rights-heart-conservation
