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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/04/two-sides-of-the-same-coin-governments-stress-links-between-climate-and-nature-collapse>
"As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news
from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of
ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil’s enormous
wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In
Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the
boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries
were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a
combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada’s wildfire season
crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades
– behind only last year’s burn, which released more carbon than some of the
world’s largest emitting countries.
In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks,
and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations
closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from
around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting
damage from global heating, and vice versa – emphasising that climate and
biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis
was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and
nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.
The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in
Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. “One of
the other things that’s really struck me coming here and speaking to the
Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate
crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global
north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much
less about nature – perhaps because we’re already more nature-depleted. But
those two things connect entirely,” he said."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
