Shkoi Kurdistan-
When the world’s leading conservation congress kicks off Friday in the French port city of Marseille it will aim to deliver one key message: protecting wildlife must not be seen as a noble gesture but an absolute necessity — for people and the planet.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.
Over nine days, government ministries, indigenous groups and NGOs — backed by a network of 16,000 scientists — will hammer out conservation proposals that could help set the agenda at critical upcoming UN summits on food systems, biodiversity and climate change.
Previous congresses paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.
“This is the only place where both governments and conservation organisations, big and small, are all members,” said Susan Lieberman, a 30-year conservation veteran and vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
“When IUCN says ‘this is our position’, that’s not just one more conservation group,” she added.
“It’s a position informed by almost every government and every conservation organisation in the world.”
– ‘Mass extinction’ –
The World Economic Forum has put a hard number on our vulnerability: $44 trillion of economic value generated every year — half of global GDP — largely dependent on services rendered by nature, from water for agriculture to healthy soil in which to grow our food.
The creatures with which we share the planet are at high risk too — from us.
As the human population climbs toward nine billion by mid-century, many creatures are being crowded, eaten, snared, poisoned, poached, hawked and hunted out of existence.
