Biodiversité

It seems that David Attenborough’s programme Extinction: the facts moved many people to tears.  To me, that is an entirely rational response to the ongoing destruction to the natural world.  This relentless loss of the beauty and wonder of our planet not only corrodes the soul, it compromises our own species’ prosperity.

But, as I wrote on Friday, grief needs to be matched with a determination to change, bolstered by the belief that we know what it takes to make things better. 

Today must be the moment that we choose a different path and take steps to revive our world.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO5) will be published later today and will reveal that the world has largely failed in its collective efforts to save nature over the last decade, and none of the targets (set under the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity - the CBD) have been fully met.

To pre-empt this, we launched A Lost Decade for Nature, which shines a light on the UK’s limited contribution towards these global biodiversity targets.  According to the UK Government’s own assessment of performance, we will miss over two thirds of our commitments for nature made in 2010 (14 out of 20).