New Forests' founder and executive chairman David Brand said the 2022 Kuming-Montreal Global Diversity Framework had set a new target that 30 per cent of all ecosystems be under conservation management by 2030.
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00:00Biodiversity has been around for a long time, it was part of the Rio Orr Summit, but I think in some ways it's been overshadowed by the whole climate change issue, and probably to some degree because there's more direct economic stakes in the oil and gas and fossil fuel industry.
00:19But it has crept up on us in a way that I think people have become suddenly surprised as to how bad we've let things get.
00:29And when you look at some of the underlying statistics, something like 90% of our wild fisheries are either fully fished or overfished.
00:41When you look at 30-year studies in the United Kingdom and Germany, and you see that we've lost 70% of flying insect biomass, you see studies of the biomass of mammals.
00:55It says today that 96% of the biomass of mammals is humans, farm animals, and pets. Only 4% is wild animals.
01:05And in some ways our human society now has become so dominant over nature that I think people have suddenly been stunned into action, if you will.
01:18So how did we get there? I mean, we have now 8 billion people on Earth, we have 100 trillion gross world product, and we're just steadily eroding nature to try to keep that economy growing.
01:33That's led to substantial conversion of natural ecosystems for urbanization, for farmland and agriculture.
01:42We're seeing intensification of production that's leading to more use of synthetic pesticides, excess nutrients that are running off from agricultural systems, even creating dead zones in the ocean.
01:57We're seeing these degraded ecosystems now, invasive species are flourishing and causing even more damage to the functionality of ecosystems.
02:09And these degraded and isolated habitats now are being clobbered by climate change and severe windstorms and sudden heavy rainfall events and wildfires and so on.
02:22Somebody has characterized it as the death by a thousand cuts, in that there are so many of these factors now operating in concert that it really is, I don't want to overuse the word, but an emergency kind of a situation.