By: Damilola Olawuyi & Elena Athwal
At the conclusion of the fifteenth United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal in December 2020, the participating countries celebrated the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This Framework elaborates global targets to be achieved by 2030, including the conservation and safeguarding of the wide variety of plants, animals, and other biological resources that make up our environment.
This landmark agreement is the latest in the series of global efforts such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, all of which are aimed at addressing the rapid loss of the planet’s invaluable biological resources, without which humans and other elements of the ecosystem may not be able to live life sufficiently. For example, without bees, food crops may not grow which may lead to food scarcity, hunger, and a total collapse of the global food industry. In addition to the intrinsic and ecosystem value of these biological resources in providing pivotal support for the subsistence and survival of current and future generations, such resources also have enormous economic value especially for diversifying revenue sources through a prosperous tourism industry.
Yet, environmental stresses relating to the destruction of wildlife habitats, over-exploitation of plant and animal species, poaching, use of toxic pesticides, illicit trade in plants and animal resources, climate change impacts, coupled with gaps in environmental awareness and education, have for many years contributed to rapid biodiversity loss across the world, and will require urgent legal responses.
One recent and very alarming study has found that Earth’s wild mammals comprise less than 10 per cent of the total biomass of humans and less than 4% of that of domesticated animals. These findings are supported by the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services issued by scientific organizations such as Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and the Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reveal that biodiversity loss and land degradation are taking place at an unprecedented rate.
The devastating impacts of the ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID- 19) pandemic have also accentuated calls for a more balanced relationship with nature and all elements of the ecosystem in order to reduce the rising scale of pandemics and zoonotic diseases – that is, infectious diseases that are transferred from animals to humans – in areas where they did not exist before.