Mountain people are getting a new lease on life thanks to research carried out across the planet.
For the 500 million people who live in the shadows of high mountain peaks, transformative changes at all levels of decision-making must be kick-started to prepare for major shifts in ways of life stemming from the climate emergency and associated social upheavals, according to a new study.
‘It took a long time for policymakers to acknowledge the important role that mountains play in supporting human life,’ said co-author of the study, R. Edward Grumbine. ‘2019 was an instrumental year for accelerating efforts, since many international agencies published reports on highland areas, detailing the interlinked nature of biodiversity, ecosystem services, human livelihoods, institutions and governance. This is paving the way for learning more about people–nature interactions and offers transformative solutions for the sustainable development of mountain environments.’
To meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity, researchers have proposed five strategies for protecting the global ecosystem.
Responding to calls to rethink the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the world’s blueprint for the next decade of biodiversity conservation and management, researchers at the China Programme of World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and the Kunming Institute of Botany have published a new paper describing five transformative changes to stabilize and then reverse critical biodiversity losses. They advocate for inclusion of these five steps in plans developed at the upcoming Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the CBD to be held in Kunming, China in 2021. Bioscience under the title, ‘Five steps to inject transformative change into the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,’ posits a radical new path forward for reversing the accelerating loss of biodiversity and strengthening our capacity t