(Roughly) Daily

As Chris Armstrong reminds us, the environment is about so much more than climate…

Later this month [May 22] it will be World Biodiversity Day, and we will again celebrate the remarkable contributions that biodiversity makes to the resilience and productivity of the earth’s ecosystems. But it will also be a fitting time to face the continued failure of our institutions to grasp the scale of biodiversity loss. Or, if not to grasp it, to respond in any way adequately.

The figures speak for themselves. Since 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity has been charged with agreeing global targets for biodiversity conservation. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2011-2020, for instance, aimed to halve the rate of habitat loss, protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems, and much else besides.

None of those targets were met. In response, the Kunming-Montreal Agreement recently agreed to protect 30% of ecosystems by 2030, to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems, and so on and so on and so on. On current projections, these targets are going to be missed too, by some distance. Like Canute ordering the tides to stop, it turns out that setting targets, by itself, achieves nothing.

So why has the biodiversity governance regime failed so spectacularly?…

Read on learn: “Why has global biodiversity governance failed so badly?” from @crookedtimber.

(Image above: source)

* E. O. Wilson

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As we value variety, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that President Theodore Roosevelt convened a three-day Conference of Governors. Largely driven by U.S. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the gathering was focused on the problems of conservation. The Conference was a seminal event in the history of “conservationism,” most fundamentally in drawing public attention to the issue in a highly visible way. More concretely, there were two outgrowths of the Conference: the National Conservation Commission, (which Roosevelt and Pinchot set up with representatives from the states and Federal agencies, and which prepared the first inventory of the natural resources of the United States), and the first National Conservation Congress, which Pinchot led as an assembly of private conservation interests. Not long after, annual governors’ conferences became a regular event, and 38 state conservation commissions were created.