The Conversation has published a number of articles about COP15 and biodiversity. Here is reference to two of them which we highlight in the hope that they might be of use to teachers and students.
In the first of them Bram Büscher, Wageningen University and Rosaleen Duffy, University of Sheffield, argue that not only did the deal that emerged from COPO15 failed to address the root causes of nature’s destruction, but also that global summits to arrest the Earth’s deteriorating health look increasingly farcical. They write:
“A major biodiversity conference, recently concluded in Montreal, Canada, was billed as the event that will decide the “fate of the entire living world”. All well then that the meeting closed with what has been hailed as a “historic” breakthrough: a deal to protect 30% of all land and water on Earth by 2030.
How historic is this deal, really? Judging from the effect of protected areas and major environment meetings over the last few decades, we should not get our hopes up. In fact, this deal may force us to reconsider the usefulness of such meetings altogether.
If there is anything that defines the history of mainstream conservation it is the steady rise of protected areas, covering about 2% of the globe in the 1960s to around 17% now. This progress was incredibly difficult, and still created many ineffective “paper parks” where species are protected from hunting and other threats in name only. Worse, it bred human rights abuses and violence as people were excluded from land that was declared off-limits.
If it took 60 years to get to 17%, how realistic is a near-doubling of Earth’s protected areas over the next eight years? And how will it, despite the pact’s rhetoric of placing indigenous peoples at the centre of conservation, ensure that the violence of the past is not repeated? All this is left to the more than 190 countries under the treaty to implement. Given the pressures of the extinction crisis and the increasing militarisation of conservation, we have little faith that history will now suddenly work out differently.”
Read on …
The second is by Alexandra Zimmermann, University of Oxford, who wonders what living in harmony with nature really look like, and says that human-wildlife conflict can undermine public support for conservation. He writes:
“The 196 countries meeting for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, are negotiating a new set of targets for reversing the loss of Earth’s biodiversity. They have set themselves a formidable challenge: ensuring humanity is “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.
As part of this aim, and for the first time in an international agreement, nations are also being asked to work towards resolving human-wildlife conflict. When Swiss farmers fear losing livestock to rebounding wolf populations or the return of tigers threatens communities in Nepal, conservation can reach an impasse. These conflicts magnify the costs of biodiversity to local people – and, when left unresolved or handled badly, fuel tensions that erode support for protecting nature more broadly.
Standing by to help is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)‘s Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Specialist Group – a global expert body which I chair. We convene the best knowledge available and are producing global guidelines and hosting a three-day international conference on managing these kinds of conflict in Oxford from March 30 next year.
Resolving conflict and achieving coexistence is far from easy. While all human-wildlife conflicts revolve around the risks that animals can pose to human interests – and the persecution of those animals in retaliation – these situations also provoke disagreements among groups of people. For example, although wolves can and do occasionally kill sheep in Europe and North America, conflict primarily arises between those who want to cull wolves and those who want to protect them. Tensions escalate, mistrust and divisions ensue and each group becomes increasingly entrenched in its view of the situation, blocking progress.
Because of this, resolving conflicts about wildlife is not a simple matter of installing fences, lights or noisemakers to keep animals away from crops, property or livestock. Resolving human-wildlife conflicts means resolving divisions and disharmony between people. This, more than any fence, is ultimately what makes coexistence possible. This means identifying any underlying grievances and addressing these through dialogue, engaging everyone involved in a joint agreement.
Without this groundwork, any practical measures outsiders suggest to communities for keeping wildlife at bay are likely to be poorly implemented or rejected altogether.”
Read on …