The world faces a biodiversity crisis that, scientists say, has a single parallel in our planet’s history: the destruction that followed the collision of an asteroid with the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs.
Fortunately, we can do something about this impending catastrophe and this week we did.
At the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference: COP15 that convened earlier this month in Montreal, Canada — originally scheduled to be held in April in Kunming, China, the meeting was rescheduled and relocated because of the COVID-19 pandemic — and concluded last Monday, 188 governments agreed to a sweeping deal to protect the Earth’s biodiversity. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) identified four goals and 23 targets to protect the environment, the most important of which, the "30x30" proposal places 30% of land and sea under protection by 2030. It’s an invaluable agreement but only if implemented. Unfortunately, the record of these deals is not encouraging.