The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organisation for the protection of nature meets on Friday hoping to help galvanise action as the world faces intertwined biodiversity and climate crises.
Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining, and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference, hosted by France in the city of Marseille.
The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial United Nations summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.
“Our common goal is to put nature at the top of international priorities—because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.
He said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.
The international community is grappling with a near set of goals to “live in harmony with nature” by 2050, with interim goals to be set for this decade.
Nutritious food, breathable air, clean water, nature-based medicines—humans are dependent on the health of the ecosystems they are destroying.
Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.
But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.
In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction—raising the specter that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in half a billion years.