A warning from RSPB that that efforts to protect Britain’s wildlife have suffered a “lost decade” because of a failure to meet targets agreed in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The RSPB said the UK was failing on goals to protect land and sea habitats and reverse the slide towards extinction for threatened species and was not putting enough money into protecting nature. Government analysis of its progress under international goals agreed in 2010 to reverse declines in nature by this year shows it is meeting or exceeding five out of 20 targets to help wildlife and habitats. But an assessment by the RSPB suggests the UK is doing worse than the official analysis and is making no progress or is going in the wrong direction in six areas.
Also, a stark warning in the WWF Living Planet Report 2020 on the decline of nature and how it is having catastrophic impacts not only on wildlife populations but also on human health and all aspects of our lives. The section on oceans states that nowhere in the ocean is entirely unaffected by humans and that only 13% of its area can be considered to be wilderness, with waste and marine litter found even in deep ocean trenches. Human pressures are continuing to increase with the negative effects threatening the goods and services – such as food provision, climate regulation, carbon storage and coastal protection – that marine ecosystems provide to human society and upon which we all depend. The main drivers of change such as fishing, climate change and coastal development, are listed along with their potential negative impacts and examples of the ecological consequences.
The report describes a new research initiative – the Bending the Curve Initiative – that has developed pioneering modelling, providing a ‘proof of concept’ that we can halt, and reverse, terrestrial biodiversity loss from land-use change. The models show that there is still an opportunity to flatten, and reverse, the loss of nature if we take urgent and unprecedented conservation action and make transformational changes in the way we produce and consume food.