LAGUNA, Mar, 8 — Today, the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity joins the world in celebrating International Women’s Day. The theme “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world” underlines the central role of women in surmounting one of the worst pandemics of.
Mongabay-India editor recognized among 16 Women Restoring the Earth mongabay.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mongabay.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
February 18, 2021
As Earth’s biodiversity declines, the perilous consequences are proving to only rise.
The destabilisation of national economies, threats to food systems, escalation of climate change, and likelihood of global pandemics such as COVID-19 are all increasingly linked to the loss of the planet’s variety of life.
This year, however, the United Nations (UN) Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) is set to instate a new global plan for biodiversity conservation that will run through 2030, seeing nations and leaders commit to higher standards of protection and restoration of natural habitats and ecosystems.
Concurrently, 2021 also sees the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a 10-year effort to “prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide”.
GLF Live: How can we restore the Aral Sea basin? 02 Mar 2021, 12:00 CET, Online
Share this
GLF Live with Vadim Sokolov and Kristina Toderich
The Aral Sea in Central Asia, once the world’s fourth-largest inland water body, has nearly disappeared. Weather shifts from climate change coupled with decades of resource depletion from the regional reliance on water-intensive crops, has seen the body of water shrink to about one-tenth of its former size
– a water surface area the size of Ireland now nothing but sand.
The Aral Sea basin spans the western reaches Uzbek-Kazakh border, and its degradation has taken with it the livelihoods and local economies of some 40 million people. Additionally, a formerly thriving fishing economy has been replaced with the growth of cotton, rice and other commodities that often receive toxic herbicides and pesticides, which have leeched into the sea bed and led to a rise in infant mortality rates and cancer.
Researchers, NGOs and businesses show how to transform the global food system, locally.
During the Global Landscapes Forum’s Biodiversity Digital Conference 2020, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) brought together practitioners from four projects funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety through its International Climate Initiative for a global learning and knowledge-exchange event.
Public- and private-sector experts from both the global South and the global North shared their experience and insights into the economic gains of biodiversity-friendly food production.
The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the vulnerability of the world’s food systems to shocks. The post-COVID decade must be managed in a way that builds future resilience. Local and global circular economies that advance biodiverse agricultural landscapes are the way forward.