24th meeting of the Subsidiary Body con Scientific, Technical and Technological Advise - SBSTTA 24 / 3rd meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation SBI 3
The cart before the horse?
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As the negotiations of SBSTTA 24 mover forward, civil society wonders if we are putting the cart before the horse
Once upon a time, some 30 years ago, life was very easy for conservationists. Instead of having to cope with complicated concepts like biodiversity, which are defined and quantifiable with scientifically agreed indicators, they could simply conserve “nature”. Almost everything that looked more or less green qualified as “nature”: pine plantations, destroyed wetlands (called “polders” in countries like the Netherlands), potato fields with some flowers in them, shrimp ponds ,or city parks. Moreover, all this nature could easily be protected by simply putting a fence around it. The resulting protected areas, the only areas that could be controlled by, often politically insignificant, nature conservation agencies and organizations, formed the cornerstone of nature conservation policies. Then, in 1992, the Convention on Biodiversity came along, and everything became more complicated. Suddenly it mattered whether “nature” was biodiverse or not, and whether it was actually an ecosystem ...
Clarifying baselines and goals in the UNFCCC While the UNFCCC GHG baseline is robust and clear, its temperature goals and targets are not. The UNFCCC climate baseline is the pre-industrial level of GHG in the atmosphere - chosen because it supports the temperature regime under which life on Earth as we know it has thrived. The goal of limiting global warming to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees above the pre industrial level was chosen in an attempt to minimize harm to life on Earth. However, concerns are growing that this goal is inadequate. The current increase in global average temperature (1.1 degrees) is exacerbating loss and damage from drought, fire, pests and disease. And evidence is mounting that the impact of these increasing threats is greater in damaged and fragmented ecosystems. The UNFCCC concept of net zero assumes 1 tonne of carbon emitted from any source has the same value as 1 tonne of carbon sequestered in any way. It ignores profound dif...
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