Still time to reverse damage to ‘ravaged’ ecosystems

June 2021 Climate and Environment

With the world beginning to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is increasing recognition that healing from the pandemic is linked to healing the planet.

Resetting humanity’s relationship with nature will be the focus of World Environment Day on June 5, which also marks the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a ten-year global push to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation.

“It’s easy to lose hope when we think of the sheer magnitude of the challenges we face and the avalanche of bad news that we wake up to every morning,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“But just as we caused the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and the pollution crisis, we can reverse the damage that we’ve done; we can be the first generation to reimagine, to recreate and to restore nature to kickstart action for a better world.”

This year, Pakistan is the host country for World Environment Day and showcasing its own restoration initiatives, such as its Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Project, which aims to plant 10 billion trees by 2023. Pakistan, which is one of the countries most at risk from climate change, has also launched an Ecosystem Restoration Fund to support nature-based solutions to climate change.

Nature can and must be part of the solution as international momentum grows to decarbonize all sectors of our economies. Ecosystem restoration can help protect and improve livelihoods, regulate disease, reduce risk of natural disasters and contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Kicking off the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, he said the planet was rapidly reaching a “point of no return”, cutting down forests, polluting rivers and oceans, and ploughing grasslands “into oblivion”.

“We are ravaging the very ecosystems that underpin our societies”, the UN chief warned in his message for the Day, being marked on Saturday.

Our degradation of the natural world is destroying the very food, water and resources needed to survive, and already undermining the well-being of 3.2 billion people – or 40 per cent of humanity.

But fortunately, the Earth is resilient and “we still have time to reverse the damage we have done”, he added.

Safeguarding the planet

By restoring ecosystems, he said that “we can drive a transformation that will contribute to the achievement of all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.

“Accomplishing these things will not only safeguard the planet’s resources. It will create millions of new jobs by 2030, generate returns of over $7 trillion dollars every year and help eliminate poverty and hunger.”

‘Global call to action’

The UN chief described the decade of restoration as “a global call to action” that will draw together “political support, scientific research and financial muscle to massively scale up restoration”.

He pointed out that the next 10 years are “our final chance to avert a climate catastrophe, turn back the deadly tide of pollution and end species loss”.

“Everyone can contribute”, said the Secretary-General. “So, let today be the start of a new decade – one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all”.

Call for new human rights standard

Meanwhile, UN independent human rights experts have called on the UN to formally recognize that living in a safe, healthy and sustainable environment is “indeed a human right”.

“Of the UN’s 193 members, 156 have written this right into their constitutions, legislation and regional treaties, and it is time for the United Nations to provide leadership by recognising that every human is entitled to live in a clean environment”, they said in a joint statement marking World Environment Day.

“The lives of billions of people on this planet would improve if such a right were adopted, respected, protected and fulfilled”, the UN experts added.

Nearly 50 years after the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, in which Member States declared that people have a fundamental right to “an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being,” the time is ripe for concrete action, they said, calling on both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly to take action.

 Catalyst for action

A surge in emerging diseases that jump from animals to humans, such as COVID-19, along with the climate emergency, pervasive toxic pollution and a dramatic loss of biodiversity, have brought the future of the planet to the top of the international agenda.

The experts said that human rights must be put at the centre of any measures to tackle the environmental crisis.

“Putting human rights at the heart of these actions clarifies what is at stake, catalyses ambitious action, emphasizes prevention, and above all protects the most vulnerable people on our planet”, they stated.  “We could, for example, truly transform our world by shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy, creating a circular, waste-free economy, and moving from damaging exploitation of ecosystems to living in harmony with nature”.

In a world where the global environmental crisis causes more than nine million premature deaths every year and threatens the health and dignity of billions of people, the experts upheld that “the UN can be a catalyst for ambitious action by recognising that everyone, everywhere, has the right to live in a healthy environment”.