The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress began on September 3, 2021, in Marseille, France. This is the world’s largest and most inclusive environmental forum built to tackle biodiversity, nature-based recovery, and climate change. Their key message is that disappearing species and the destruction of ecosystems are just as threatening as global warming.
According to Africa News, UN biodiversity experts have held crucial summits on the state of the planet in the past. In 2019, they warned that millions of species are on the brink of extinction and that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.
Reversing habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining, and warming the planet will dominate this year’s discussions. This nine-day conference will measure how close animal and plant species are to vanishing permanently due to habitat loss, overexploitation, and illegal trading. Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their range and population; only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers, and a few dozen Amur leopards are left in the wild.
IUCN Chief Bruno Oberle advised the following:
“We are facing huge challenges. We are seeing the climate changing and impacting hugely our societies.”
“We are seeing biodiversity disappearing and the pandemic hitting our economies, our families, our health.”
Indigenous people, for the first time in IUCN’s seven-decade history, will also be invited to share their knowledge on how to heal the natural world. For example, rampant deforestation and climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a fatal tipping point, which is having a direct effect on the natives who live in those areas. So motions for this year’s conference will include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combating wildlife crime, and preventing pandemics.
Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, the lead coordinator for Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA), stated the following:
“We are demanding from the world our right to exist as peoples, to live with dignity in our territories.”
These are some much-needed discussions. I’ll keep you all updated on any additional information.
Until Next Time…
(Sources)
Photo Credit: Twitter
IUCN World Conservation Congress opens in Marseille and online. IUCN. (2021, September 3). https://www.iucn.org/news/secretariat/202109/iucn-world-conservation-congress-opens-marseille-and-online.
World’s leading global conservation congress opens in Marseille. Africa News. (2021, September 4). https://www.africanews.com/2021/09/04/world-s-leading-global-conservation-congress-opens-in-marseille/.
HONEST MEDIA 
“For example, rampant deforestation and climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a fatal tipping point, which is having a direct effect on the natives who live in those areas.” …
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Problematically, there are the theologically inclined who get into high office with their problematic disregard — or even contempt — for the natural environment. For instance, the evangelical Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, theocratically declared two summers ago that his presidency (and, I presume, all of the environmental damage he did while in office) was “fulfilling a mission from God”. http://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-religion-idINKBN26R0BQ
Although the Amazonian rainforest is home to a third of all known terrestrial plant, animal and insect species, and our planet’s natural environment does not honor any international boundary, he told the rest of the rightfully concerned world, “You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil’s, not yours”. He also advised France’s president to “mind your own business”. If only it were true the environmental damage done by morally and ethically corrupt governments and corporate puppet-masters was all somehow poetically miraculously confined strictly to the owners’ territory!
Also worrisome is that many of Canada’s (my home country’s) Conservative party politicians — not to mention our thinly veiled theocratic previous prime minister — are/were ideologically aligned with the pro-fossil-fuel mainstream American Evangelical community and Republican Party. They generally share the belief that to defend the natural environment from the planet’s greatest polluters, notably big fossil fuel, is to go against God’s will and therefore is inherently evil. (No wonder they hate any carbon tax. And for conservatives they sure pollute the planet most liberally.)
Among them all may be those who credit the bone-dry-vegetation areas uncontrollably burning, notably California, global warming and pollution to God’s supposed wrath upon collective humankind’s ‘sinfulness’. Astonishingly, what really matters to the theocrats is job creation, however limited or temporary, and economic growth, however intangible the concept when compared to actual largescale and very consequential environmental devastation.
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