Forests are key components of the global carbon cycle and dominate mitigation strategies for climate change and biodiversity loss. In contrast, the importance of and threats facing ocean forests—kelp forests—are comparatively underappreciated. Yet, increasing the global area of kelp forests would enhance biodiversity and drawdown CO2, mitigating climate change.
Largely driven by the corporate sector, the recent surge of interest in trees as a solution to climate change has a distinct emphasis on planting trees. Realizing anticipated benefits will require managing the risks and trade-offs of land-use interventions and embracing the imperative of protecting existing forests.
Mangrove forests are found on sheltered coastlines in tropical, subtropical, and some warm temperate regions. These forests support unique biodiversity and provide a range of benefits to coastal communities, but as a result of large-scale conversion for aquaculture, agriculture, and urbanization, mangroves are considered increasingly threatened ecosystems. Scientific advances have led to accurate and comprehensive global datasets on mangrove extent, structure, and condition, and these can support evaluation of ecosystem services and stimulate greater conservation and rehabilitation efforts.
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Global Citizen, 22nd April 2020
To mark Earth Day 2020, Global Citizen spoke with seven youth climate activists who shared their hopes for a future in which we take bold climate action. This article contributes to SDGs 1, 7, 13, 14 and 15.
This articles highlights one of the winning proposals of the Elsevier Foundation Green & Sustainable Chemistry Challenge, “Butterfly attractant for pollination and ecosystem health.” The project, which combines ecology and chemistry, involved field observations and lab-based experiments to protect biodiversity in the Western Ghats of India by increasing butterfly pollination, contributing to SDGs 13, 15 and 17.
The Paris Agreement to keep global temperature increase to well-below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C requires to formulate ambitious climate-change mitigation scenarios to reduce CO2 emissions and to enhance carbon sequestration. These scenarios likely require significant land-use change. Failing to mitigate climate change will result in an unprecedented warming with significant biodiversity loss. The mitigation potential on land is high. However, how land-based mitigation options potentially affect biodiversity is poorly understood.
Urban expansion is considered to be one of the main threats to global biodiversity yet some pollinator groups, particularly bees, can do well in urban areas. Recent studies indicate that both local and landscape-level drivers can influence urban pollinator communities, with local floral resources and the amount of impervious cover in the landscape affecting pollinator abundance, richness and community composition. Urban intensification, chemicals, climate change and increased honey bee colony densities all negatively affect urban pollinators.
Insect pollinators are becoming visible to societies. Many peer-reviewed papers evidence biophysical and ecological aspects of managed and non-managed insect pollinators. Evidence on stressors of declines yield peer-reviewed calls for action. Yet, insect pollinator declines are inherently a human issue, driven by a history of land-use trends, changes in technologies, and socio-cultural perceptions that unwittingly cause and perpetuate declines. Conservation requires integrating social and ecological understandings to reconfigure human behaviors across societies’ sectors.
Ocean health is critical for human well-being but is threatened by multiple stressors. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to protect 10% of their waters by 2020. The scientific evidence supporting the use of marine protected areas (MPAs) to conserve biodiversity stems primarily from knowledge on fully protected areas, but most of what is being established is partially protected. Here, we assess the protection levels of the 1,062 Mediterranean MPAs.
The IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) World Conservation Congress called for the full protection of 30% of each marine habitat globally and at least 30% of all the ocean. Thus, we quantitatively prioritized the top 30% areas for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) globally using global scale measures of biodiversity from the species to ecosystem level.
