NGOs demand action for endangered wildlife at Marseille biodiversity conference
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference kicked off Friday in France’s second-largest city, Marseille, with NGOs and scientists hoping to bring the world from a sense of urgency to concrete actions to protect life. endangered wildlife on the planet.
After wildfires and extreme weather events across the globe, not to mention the latest IPCC report, underscored this summer that climate change is already a terrifying reality, the IUCN conference opened on September 3 to bring together to NGOs, scientists, companies, indigenous peoples and the government. representatives from all over the world.
NGOs are especially interested in using this eight-day conference to make a difference. Since the conference is open to the general public this year, they see impressing people about the stakes for biodiversity as one of their most important missions.
“People from our organizations will be there to raise awareness, and we will be demonstrating on a local beach to warn of the degradation of the world’s seas and oceans,” said Maxime Paquin, manager of biodiversity projects at France Nature Environnement, an umbrella group. . of French environmental NGOs.
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But for NGOs meeting at the conference, their main goal is to use it as a “platform for political comment,” Paquin said. Like other NGOs, France Nature Environnement will vote on 19 motions, including the protection of marine mammals, the protection of ancient European forests and the limitation of the impact of the mining industry on biodiversity.
These recommendations are not legally binding, but will allow NGOs to influence discussions at COP15 on biodiversity in China in October and COP26 on climate change in the UK in November.
“We are eager to use our influence at IUCN to take these motions forward and then push for them to be implemented around the world,” said Pierre Cannet, advocacy director for WWF France.
A highlight of the conference will be an update to the IUCN list of endangered species, which places endangered species on a spectrum of seven categories, from “least concern” to a definitive “extinct”. Currently, about a million species of animals and plants are threatened with extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Platform for Science and Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
‘Lack of means’
Since 1900, the number of local species in most territorial habitats has declined by about 20 percent on average, IPBES said. The scientific consensus is clear: the disappearance of entire species and ecosystems is a direct consequence of human activity, such as pollution, deforestation and overfishing, and is a considerable danger to the well-being of humanity.
Faced with this threat, the IUCN conference represents a “good way to regroup and see how countries can take urgent steps in the future, in a context where economic recovery plans are drawn up at that global level and national budgets spend very little to biodiversity, ”Cannet said.
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“We are trying to make sure that France makes a difference when it comes to biodiversity,” Cannet continued, denouncing its “failure to enact a green agricultural transition and backtracking on the ban on the use of pesticides such as neonicotinoids and glyphosate.”
Meanwhile, Paquin hopes this conference will bring up the thorny issue of financing. Governments have not allocated sufficient funds to protect biodiversity, so efforts to do so “lack the means,” he said. Consequently, they intend to rely on commercial and development banks to finance the ecological transition.
As highlighted by WWF France, the International Development Finance Club, a union of development banks led by the French Development Agency, could play an important role in protecting diversity by allocating funds for biodiversity, as it commits $ 630 billion (€ 530 billion) per year for economic development, which includes $ 100 billion dedicated specifically to addressing climate change.
People should not expect miraculous change to emerge from the IUCN conference, Cannet said. But it could well act as a “springboard for measures against actions that damage biodiversity.”
This article was adapted from the original in French.
