The Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) welcomed the outcomes of the One Planet Summit that was hosted by the French government, United Nations and World Bank on January 11.
“We welcome fresh commitments from world leaders, which the ACB views with much optimism and enthusiasm,” ACB Executive Director Theresa Mundita Lim said in a news release.
“These pledges pivot initiatives to conserve and restore ecosystems in the Asean region and across the globe, especially now that we are ushering in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration,” Lim said.
Funds for nature-based solutions
At the summit that was held via videoconference owing to the pandemic, governments, such as the United Kingdom (UK) and France, announced earmarking funds for nature-based solutions.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK will commit at least £3 billion ($4 billion) to climate-change solutions that protect and restore nature and biodiversity over five years.
The amount of $10 billion was earmarked for the Great Green Wall, a project to restore degraded lands in the Sahel in Africa along an 8,000-kilometer band from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, along with new financial commitments from Norway and Germany.
“The pledges of governments are of great importance for other regions and subregions. Such commitments could not come at a more opportune time ahead of the 15th meeting [in October] of the Conference of Parties [COP] to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, where the post-2020 global biodiversity framework is expected to be adopted,” Lim said in the news release.
Asean initiatives
In 2020, the ACB co-organised webinars with Pew Charitable Trusts and the High Ambition Coalition for Nature with the National Geographic Society’s Campaign for Nature to raise awareness among the Asean member-states on the importance of the plan to carve out 30 percent of global lands and oceans for protection by 2030 (30×30 Goals), the news release said.
Based on the Asean’s initial inputs to the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, resource mobilization—including setting up a finance mechanism explicitly for biodiversity—is a crucial tool to effectively implement the framework and achieve the 2050 vision.
Meanwhile, in terms of the One Health approach to address existing and emerging outbreaks of diseases, Lim shared the regional and country-level initiatives made in the Asean in line with incorporating biodiversity into public health responses and regional development processes during the One Planet summit pre-event webinar “Prevention of Pandemics and Protection of Biodiversity” organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
She highlighted the initiatives in the Asean, such as Malaysia’s wildlife disease surveillance program, Indonesia’s economic support and livelihood stimulus to ease environmental pressure on protected areas, and Vietnam’s One Health strategy pre-dating the Covid-19 pandemic, the ACB news release said.
The ACB, an intergovernmental body created by the 10 Asean member-states, aims to facilitate cooperation in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and natural resources in the region.
High-ambition coalition
Top US officials were absent at the summit, as were the leaders of Russia, India and Brazil, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who hosted the event, announced that the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which was launched in 2019 by Costa Rica, France and Britain to set a target for the 30×30 Goals, has now been joined by 50 countries.
A 2019 UN report on biodiversity showed that human activities are putting nature in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming for over 1 million species of plants and animals.
“We know even more clearly amid the crisis we are going through that all our vulnerabilities are interrelated,” Macron said. “Pressure on nature exerted by human activities is increasing inequalities and threatening our health and our security.”
“We can change the story if we decide to do it,” he added.
4 major topics
The one-day summit focused on four major topics: protecting terrestrial and marine ecosystems; promoting agroecology, a more sustainable way to grow food; increasing funding to protect biodiversity; and identifying links between deforestation and the health of humans and animals, AP said.
The summit also launched a program called Prezode, which Macron presented as an unprecedented international initiative to prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases and pandemics, which is already mobilizing over 400 researchers and experts across the world.
The move comes as scientists suspect that the coronavirus that first infected people in China last year came from an animal source, probably bats.
“Pandemic recovery is our chance to change course,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said. “With smart policies and the right investments, we can chart a path that brings health to all, revives economies, builds resilience and rescues biodiversity.”
Guterres also stressed that according to the World Economic Forum, emerging business opportunities across nature could create 191 million jobs by 2030.
Other leaders at the summit were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
China, represented by Vice Premier Han Zheng, agreed that “collective efforts” are needed.
The event, organized by France, the United Nations and the World Bank, took place without top US officials, as President-elect Joe Biden, a strong proponent of climate issues, does not take office until January 20.
The UN’s global climate summit, the COP26, has also been rescheduled for November in the UK.
Participants welcomed the creation of Africa’s Great Green Wall project, a so-called accelerator, which is expected to release billion of dollars over the next five years to finance the program.
Launched in 2007, it aims to plant an arc of trees running 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) across Africa—from Senegal along the Atlantic all the way to Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden.
Another initiative involves a new coalition of Mediterranean countries working to better protect the sea from pollution and overfishing.
Britain’s Prince Charles launched an “urgent appeal” to private-sector leaders to join a new investment alliance targeting $10 billion by 2022 to finance nature-based solutions, AP said.
Image credits: Ludovic Marin, pool photo via AP