Countries Are Gathering In an Effort To Stop a Biodiversity Collapse (nytimes.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: As 20,000 government leaders, journalists, activists and celebrities from around the world prepare to descend on Glasgow for a crucial climate summit starting late this month, another high-level international environmental meeting got started this week. The problem it seeks to tackle: A rapid collapse of species and systems that collectively sustain life on earth. The stakes at the two meetings are equally high, many leading scientists say, but the biodiversity crisis has received far less attention. "If the global community continues to see it as a side event, and they continue thinking that climate change is now the thing to really listen to, by the time they wake up on biodiversity it might be too late," said Francis Ogwal, one of the leaders of the working group charged with shaping an agreement among nations. Because climate change and biodiversity loss are intertwined, with the potential for both win-win solutions and vicious cycles of destruction, they must be addressed together, scientists say. But their global summits are separate, and one overshadows the other.
This week, environment officials, diplomats and other observers from around the world gathered online, and a small group assembled in person in Kunming, China, for the meeting, the 15th United Nations biodiversity conference. The United States is the only country in the world besides the Vatican that is not a party to the underlying treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a situation largely attributed to Republican opposition. American representatives participate on the sidelines of the talks, as do scientists and environmental advocates. Because of the pandemic, the conference has been broken into two parts. While this virtual portion was largely about drumming up political will, nations will meet again in China in the spring to ratify a series of targets aimed at tackling biodiversity loss. The aim will be to adopt a pact for nature akin to the Paris Agreement on climate change, said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the convention.
Last year, officials reported that the world's nations largely failed to achieve the targets of the previous global agreement on biodiversity, made in 2010. If the new commitments are not translated into "effective policies and concrete actions," Ms. Mrema said this week at the meeting, "we risk repeating the failures of the last decade." The working draft includes 21 targets that act as a blueprint for reducing biodiversity loss. Many are concrete and measurable, others more abstract. None are easy. They include, in summary: Create a plan, across the entire land and waters of each country, to make the best decisions about where to conduct activities like farming and mining while also retaining intact areas; Ensure that wild species are hunted and fished sustainably and safely; Reduce agricultural runoff, pesticides and plastic pollution; Use ecosystems to limit climate change by storing planet-warming carbon in nature; Reduce subsidies and other financial programs that harm biodiversity by at least $500 billion per year, the estimated amount (PDF) that governments spend supporting fossil fuels and potentially damaging agricultural practices; and Safeguard at least 30 percent of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.
This week, environment officials, diplomats and other observers from around the world gathered online, and a small group assembled in person in Kunming, China, for the meeting, the 15th United Nations biodiversity conference. The United States is the only country in the world besides the Vatican that is not a party to the underlying treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a situation largely attributed to Republican opposition. American representatives participate on the sidelines of the talks, as do scientists and environmental advocates. Because of the pandemic, the conference has been broken into two parts. While this virtual portion was largely about drumming up political will, nations will meet again in China in the spring to ratify a series of targets aimed at tackling biodiversity loss. The aim will be to adopt a pact for nature akin to the Paris Agreement on climate change, said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the convention.
Last year, officials reported that the world's nations largely failed to achieve the targets of the previous global agreement on biodiversity, made in 2010. If the new commitments are not translated into "effective policies and concrete actions," Ms. Mrema said this week at the meeting, "we risk repeating the failures of the last decade." The working draft includes 21 targets that act as a blueprint for reducing biodiversity loss. Many are concrete and measurable, others more abstract. None are easy. They include, in summary: Create a plan, across the entire land and waters of each country, to make the best decisions about where to conduct activities like farming and mining while also retaining intact areas; Ensure that wild species are hunted and fished sustainably and safely; Reduce agricultural runoff, pesticides and plastic pollution; Use ecosystems to limit climate change by storing planet-warming carbon in nature; Reduce subsidies and other financial programs that harm biodiversity by at least $500 billion per year, the estimated amount (PDF) that governments spend supporting fossil fuels and potentially damaging agricultural practices; and Safeguard at least 30 percent of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.
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In addition to the GHG emissions these hypocrites will create from air travel, only the best of the best of the highest quality expensive exotic food will be shipped in from the four corners of the globe to feed their fat elite taxpayer-funded asses.
And where does this food come from? From biodiversity destroying industrial farming practices, or caught in 2km wide catch-all nets by factory fishing trawlers, or scraped from the seabed by dragging 500m wide nets that wipes out everything living on the sea fl
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And go out of business within 2 years due to lost productivity. Farming is often an extremely low profit margin business, and very competitive. Corporations sometimes do well, and compete effectively, by undercutting more diverse but less profitable crops: that's why bananas are a monoculture, and why plagues of that monoculture are devastating to world banana production.
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But is that because they have to rely on buying lots of inputs? So the corporations profit providing inputs, and the big processed food corporations profit whilst paying farmers the minimum for the outputs. Something like that?
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Land, taxes on land, fuel for plows and harvesting equipment, capital expenses for such tools, water and pesticides and fertilizer to ensure competitive yields all add up. The farmers compete heavily with other farmers to keep prices down: it doesn't require a nefarious plot from "big processed food corporations".
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Which is why grazing cattle on open pasture is such a good deal. Most of these costs are zero. You have a few fences to mend and that's about it.
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Big corporate farms make up around 4% of the farms, but account for 21% of sales.
The bulk of sales are from the 4% to 5% of family-owned farms that each sell over $500,000 annually. The larger of those are closer to corporate farms than what people think of as family farms.
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But is that because they have to rely on buying lots of inputs? So the corporations profit providing inputs, and the big processed food corporations profit whilst paying farmers the minimum for the outputs. Something like that?
Almost nothing like that. There are plenty of problems caused by large agribusiness, like the ones you describe, but fundamentally income is low because of how little consumers want to pay for food. It doesn't take a huge marketing campaign to get consumers to spend $10 making dinner with highly processed food instead of $20 on dinner with organic produce and meats. They generally make that decision by default. Many farmers do make a good living selling produce at farmers markets where price per pounds are
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They might not have much of a choice. Soil scientists have been advising farmers for literally centuries to diversify field useage. And it can actually generate income. Agroforestry (I think it's called, been a while) is basically where you graze your sheep in a plantation forest , then every 20 years harvest the forest for a log windfall. The forest provides ample cover for the sheep and in some cases the ground litter provided feed, reducing costs of managing the sheep.
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"Without even spending too much." How much are we willing to take out of food production and the tax base of third world nations that rely on low cost, high yield monocultural bananas for protein?
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There are lots of fruits that are only eaten locally to where they are grown because they do not travel well or become unappealing. The ones that make it to us are either naturally hardy or have been bred to be so. It may be the case with many of the local bananas.
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Who? The dirt-poor subsistence farmers? Yah, they'll eat whatever they can grow. But they won't make any money doing it. If what you're trying to do is maintain the peasant population, that'll be one way to do it...
Personally, I'd rather see Brazilian farmers making a decent living, with maybe a few luxuries like, I dunno, electricity and indoor plumbing....
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Even in Brazil, 60% of bananas are the Cavendish monoculture.
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Yes.
Pathetic. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is absolutely pathetic because they want to talk about stopping a collapse that they are too cowardly to take actions to prevent. Just because it may end your political career doesn't mean you shouldn't be making the hard choices in favor of the greater good.
They will continue having meetings and continue to take no serious action.
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They will continue having meetings
We call them junkets..
Lecturing to us while enjoying foie gras...
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A large part of extinctions is politically unpopular to correct.
Take global warming as a comparison - the world could do a large amount of mitigation simply by moving to cleaner uses of energy. There's some technical problems (ramp up time, finding alternatives), some economic problems (cost), and some political problems (people employed in "dirty" industries, large compa
Biodiversity Collapse (Score:2)
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No. Biodiversity is not climate change
First of all: the fact that you think that climate change increases biodiversity doesn't necessarily make it so. I have no knowledge about it but it seems a rather optimistic .
Second: biodiversity is a problem that is separate from climate change since it has other causes: hunting/fishing, more intensive use of the land (farming/living/industry) and continuing reduction of free space (forests/rainforests).
What this article mentions is that the climate change problem ove
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Re:Biodiversity loss? (Score:5, Informative)
Just as the hare, the dog, and the cane toad have improved the bio-diversity of Australia when species migrated to new territories? Or as syphilis and other Eurpopean plagues killed all the native American of the Cuban islands after their discovery by Columbus?
Evolution involving rapid environmental change often strongly favors a few organisms, not a bio-diverse ecology.
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There are 2 sides to every coin. Yes some species are invasion, but others that are similar to the natives may survive conditions that the natives wouldn't. What would you prefer, an invasive tree/flower/insect/mammal or nothing at all?
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I'd prefer to slow it down. Even modest ecologies, especially as species migrate to new habitats, can destroy species, industries, and entire ecologies. Australia has fced this with the species I mentioned, the rabbits, the dogs, and the cane toads. Other nations and ecologies face have been devastated due to other invasive species such as kudzu and the black rat.
Evolution is an ongoing process, investing in an ecological disaster such as climate change in the hope that some survivors will be somewhat disti
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Climate change is happening too fast for evolution to keep up. If a species doesn't have time to evolve it'll go extinct.
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Though syphilis was apparently present in the Americas before Columbus, related diseases such as Yaws were endemic outside of the Americas long before Columbus. Knowing the origin of syphilis is not [nih.gov] that simple:
From the very beginning numerous theories on the origin of syphilis existed, most of which linking initially syphilis and leprosy together.
Sexual transmitted diseases were seen as a single disease for many centuries. The differentiation between gonorrhea, cancroids and syphilis as distinct maladies was achieved no earlier than XIXth century.
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No it won't increase biodiversity at all because what will happen first is lots of species will die when the climate changes fast, too fast for evolution to happen, Dead things can't evolve. And this isn't about climate change, it is about humans destroying habitats and killing life with pollution.
Seed vault (Score:2)
What happened to that seed vault in Norway? Are enough people using it? Also, DNA itself has a half life .. it chemically degrades over thousand year timescales even at freezing temperatures .. therefore for true preservation we need a vault to store the DNA sequence data of as many species as possible in some sort of non-degradable media.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Seed vault (Score:2)
That requires civilization to be around to do that. A robotic system might fail. We might not have that luxury, what if it has to be in stasis a few thousand years following a nuclear war that gets us down to a few hundred people. It might take thousands of years. The point of a seed vault is to survive civilization-ending events. What if humans are reverted to pre-stone age? It could happen after a nuclear war.
Yep, we've just about consumed (Score:2)
the ecosystem that gave us life. We are the plague.
Ecosystem services (Score:3)
There's a lot of advertising about the science and the environmentalists calling for action, but very little said about how at the top global levels, the ethos is about "stakeholders" which means giant corporations. This is because there is no trans-national governance, not really, so that just leaves the only trans-national organisations, the trans-national corporations, to take the power, grab the resources, and carve up the power. The most chilling phrase I've heard recently is "ecosystem services". Big corps and the NGOs they fund, all grabbing the resources, and driving ordinary people off their land. A sort of self-colonialisation. It's been a theme for some time. The Club of Rome in 1968 which produced the report Limits to Growth, was in fact founded by industrialists and capitalists of the 60s. Of course pollution destroys the environment, but that doesn't mean corporations should own all the resources to "manage" them for us.
Only 2/3 of the truth (Score:2, Interesting)
Climate, biodiversity, resource exhaustion.
Tackling the first two and ignoring the third bears the same issue of "win-win" vs "vicious destruction cycle".
There really only is one option: go all-in on "The Expanse"-style intra-solar-system space tech, shift heavy and energy hungry industry into orbit along with asteroid mining, energy collection by whatever dirty means necessary, and send heavy final products down the gravity well. Then make earth a residential area, with light manufacturing and service, and
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Re: Only 2/3 of the truth (Score:2)
environmentalists complaining about the damage caused by rockets
Exactly.
This is precisely why you can't solve any of those 3 problems only by itself. Most obvious solutions to any single one whould only be shifting priorities, exacerbating the other two.
For example, the most effective solution to climate change involves renewable energy and wood (carbon neutral lifecycle) as primary building material. But this is aggravating the biodiversity and resource exhaustion problem.
At this point, just doing feel-good activist stuff is actually counterproductive. What we really n
Re: Only 2/3 of the truth (Score:2)
Give me an alternative.
Get rid of people (Score:1)
If we lop off two to three billion people we won't be polluting as much and land can be returned to what it is by removing all the overlaying concrete, blacktop, and buildings. Trees and flowers and grasses will once again sprout to life and animals will naturally migrate back to these places.
This will also help mitigate flooding as water can now seep into the ground rather than rush off in torrents every time it rains, will help reduce CO2 concentrations, will help to cool things down, and in general help
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If we lop off two to three billion people we won't be polluting as much and land can be returned to what it is by removing all the overlaying concrete, blacktop, and buildings. Trees and flowers and grasses will once again sprout to life and animals will naturally migrate back to these places.
This will also help mitigate flooding as water can now seep into the ground rather than rush off in torrents every time it rains, will help reduce CO2 concentrations, will help to cool things down, and in general help with biodiversity recovery.
Imagine everyone in China and India removed at the snap of someone's fingers. Think of how much pollution comes from those two places alone and what would happen if nature was allowed to return to its natural state.
For the record, this is an aerial view [imgur.com] of Santosh Park and Uttam Nagar in Delhi, India, and this [imgur.com] is some creek in Mumbai. In case you thought I was joking.
Sorry, but Bambi doesn't vote, fight in an army, or give one a felling of power to order around.
The Left is quite happy to exploit your environmental sentiments, but they have no intention of deliberately getting rid of people in general. And the more common, poor, and dependent the people are, all the better.
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The Left is quite happy to exploit your environmental sentiments, but they have no intention of deliberately getting rid of people in general.
Don't underestimate the evil deeds the left is capable of doing. All it takes for the left leaders to control the liberal masses is to slap on a pleasant, positive, rainbow & unicorn term like 'Save the baby bird and baby seal hugs and kisses" and it's off to the races.
They are already doing it and have been doing it for decades. Some examples are:
Systemic racis
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Thanos will start with you.
Couldn't help but take a swing at the GOP, eh? (Score:1)
I've found (Score:4, Interesting)
...sometimes the best way to stop a project you think is a stupid waste of time is to make it as big as possible, bring in as many stake holders as possible, insist that everyone have a say in the final product, and include a list of impossibly vast and expensive goals.
Viola. The foolish people without enough to do will chatter ceaselessly about it, while the a) people that get shit done, and b) the people that pay for it, will both see it as the silliness it is and move on. And if for some reason you need the worthless chatterers, you can always show you "supported" it from the beginning.
It's the bureaucratic equivalent of Douglas Adams "ark b".
Loss of technology (Score:4, Insightful)
These two tricks stop 90% of biodiversity loss (Score:3)
2) Give all of Africa free access to every type of contraceptive available.
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Mans ignorance (Score:2)
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Very cynical, and very wrong. We have had lots of ecological disasters caused by science - but almost all of them were then CURED by science.
Ozone, created by the first refrigerants, cured by newer, improved refrigerants.
Acid rain, caused by sulfur in fuels, cured by replacing fossil fuels with newer, green energy methods and new tech to scrub smoke at the source.
Fertilizer run-off, caused by modern fertilizers, cured by a combination of less fertilizers, better fertilizers, planning irrigation around the
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Haha. True. But...
Science has improved medicine to the extent that there are now billions more people on the earth than the earth can sustain, and certainly far more than the earth can sustain in the lifestyles of the west, to which ALL people of the planet earth aspire, other the the afore-mentioned hippies (except that it was only a tiny fraction of hippies, as most former hippies are now wealthy and preach that others need to stop emitting ghg).
No. (Score:3)
It's not an effort to stop a "biodiversity collapse." It's an effort for 2 things:
1. A platform for celebrities to virtue signal ad nauseum
2. A forum for non-profits to pressure governments for more money to essentially do nothing other than have more such fora.