BIODIVERSITY TARGETS ALL MISSED!

Many of you will be familiar with this logo that we, and others who are signed up to it, have been using for the past ten years. It represents the Decade of Biodiversity set by the UN and agreed by nearly 200 of the world’s governments, including the UK’s.

There were twenty confirmed Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) targets (you can read them here: https://www.cbd.int/sp/targets/) towards protecting nature and halting the loss of biodiversity, but not one has been fully met. Six made some positive progress and the rest failed. Conservationists have been working hard on them over the period and have attenuated some of the shocking losses of wild species but, as usual, the nub of the problem lies in the structural inertia and ineffective “raw dough puddingness” of governments. Sir David Attenborough termed it “deeply tragic”, which it is. Those of us who are less mild than Sir David call it a four-letter-word disgrace!

There is only so much that wildlife organisations, companies and individuals can do: governments have to legislate and then enforce the measures required, such as the prevention of turning the world’s forests into intensive agricultural land and protecting wilderness and natural habitats. It does seem that government awareness of the problems has increased somewhat, but they still just gabble, emitting greenhouse-gas levels of hot air and don’t act, or if they do act, as they do with Covid for example, they confuse everyone or do unwise things that are detrimental to environmental progress like the idiocy of Brexit or bulldozing irreplaceable ancient woodlands for a new high speed train line, or sanction new coal mining! You couldn’t make it up. 

One can only hope that the exasperation and urgency this failure has engendered will bring about change at national and international government levels. Forlorn I hear you say, but we have to keep trying to get the message across. Continued failure threatens our very life on earth. Because of Covid, the date for the next CBC summit meeting has been postponed until May next year. It will be in Kunming in China. If I were religious, I would be praying for a miracle. As it is, I shall just continue to do all I can in encouraging everyone in our organisation to continue to work for biodiversity protection and net gain on all the sites in which we are involved at Betts Ecology and Estates. And we shall work to follow the principles of the new EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2030, Brexit be damned.

© Betts Ecology