Consider This from NPR - Are biodiversity efforts keeping up with the effects of climate change?

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

This week and next, world leaders are gathering in Colombia for the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to check up on their collective progress in slowing biodiversity loss.Can they successfully turn those plans into action against what the United Nations is calling "humanity's senseless and suicidal war with nature?"For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Some of the worst effects of climate change have been on display in recent weeks, but natural disasters like hurricanes, heat waves and flooding are made worse by another way humanity is altering the planet. The loss of nature. Biodiversity loss just gets a lot less attention than climate change. And I think one of the issues with biodiversity in particular is it's much less tangible. Juliana Viglione is an editor at the website Carbon Brief. She covers food, land, nature. Biodiversity is the variety of all living things on the planet, how they interact and depend on each other, like a butterfly pollinating a flower, a coral reef sheltering a fish. But more than a million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction, many within decades, because of human activities. And that delicate fabric of life

is at risk. I mean, from a sort of global view, right, biodiversity is the health of our planet. And so we should care about that as beings on this planet. And it's really the fault of humanity that we're in this situation. We rely on biodiversity for everything. We rely on it for our food, for clean water, for clean air. It was nearly two years ago during the UN Biodiversity Convention in Montreal that nearly 200 nations agreed to take several steps to stem biodiversity loss. The agreement covered a range of pressing issues from managing human-wildlife conflict to reducing subsidies for industries that harm the natural world. Viglione reported on the Montreal conference and she spoke with NPR about the process of getting so many leaders with

different priorities to agree on a framework. It was a real roller coaster. Like a few days before the end, we were starting to hear whispers of like, well, what if they don't reach an agreement here? Like, what's that? What are we going to do next? Now, this week and next, world leaders are gathering in Colombia for the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to check up on their collective progress in slowing biodiversity loss. Consider this. Two years ago, global leaders agreed on strategies to stem the loss of biodiversity. As many of those same leaders come together again, the extinction of plants and animals continues at an alarming rate. Can they successfully turn those plans into action?

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NPR's Nathan Rott is following the story and joins us now. Hi, Nate. Hey. So, Nate, tell us, what's this meeting all about? Yeah, so this is a conference of nearly every nation on the planet, every country that signed on to protect the world's plants, animals, and ecosystems under something called the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. It's, you know, very similar to the UN meetings on climate change. Sounds like a small little animate gathering, right? Yeah, just your average group of ministers, ecologists, industries, research institutes trying to figure out how to deal with what's really an existential problem for the whole of humanity. I mean, that feels like kind of an impossible task.

Help me understand this. How is the loss of nature an existential problem for humanity? Well, look, I mean, we all breathe, eat, and drink water, right? So, I mean, that might be a good place to start. Sure. You know, living creatures, including humans, you know, depend on everything from the smallest phytoplankton in the ocean that clean our air, to insects that pollinate our food, to forests that help regulate the world's climate. But a recent report shows that wildlife populations on average globally have declined by 73%

over the last 50 years. One of that report's authors, Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, says that it's a warning sign that many natural systems are in grave danger. If we look at the Amazon rainforest in particular, there's a real chance that the Amazon rainforest could tip to be a savanna or savanna grassland. If that happens, we will see a release of billions of tons of carbon. We will see the devastation of biodiversity. But even more worrying, we will see changes in global climate that will have implications for the stability and consistency of our food production. Okay, clearly there's a lot at stake here, but how is this conference supposed to help? Yeah, so this year's meeting is essentially like a check-in, right?

Two years ago in Montreal, world leaders signed on to this huge global framework that's really supposed to help humanity achieve harmony with nature. That is literally how they frame it. There was a pledge in there to protect 30% of the world's land and water by 2030, a pledge to reduce subsidies to industries that are harming nature like fossil fuel companies, pledges to reduce food waste, to provide money for poorer countries in the global south, 23 different pledges in total. So tell us, Nate, how close are they to this goal of helping humanity achieve harmony with nature? They have a very long ways to

go. There's been a bunch of reports and studies over the last few weeks showing that countries are off track to meet many of the goals that they set out to accomplish, in some cases by a lot. I talked to the executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Astrid Schumacher, and she said she does see some hope. Let's listen to her now. The fact that this is a bit slow is not because there's no action being taken, but it is because countries are taking these processes more seriously. They're more broad-based. It's not just an environment ministry that drafts the plan. They're really involving other ministries. So in other words, countries need to go beyond just creating

a new national park or protected area and really rethink their governments and entire economies. And she thinks that that is now starting to happen. That was NPR correspondent Nate Rudd. One of many issues being discussed at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity is the accelerating rate of animal extinction. NPR's climate correspondent Lauren Sommer went to Hawaii to see a group of people who are going to great lengths to protect one of the island's rare species, tiny, colorful snails. Lauren takes it from here. When a Category 5 hurricane was heading towards Oahu, David Sisco wasn't evacuating his family.

He was evacuating his snails. We were quickly driving snails as fast as we could, and then we stayed with the snails to care for them. These aren't just any snails he was protecting. Sisko is a wildlife biologist with Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources, and he works with kahuli, Hawaii's native tree snails. They're some of the rarest animals on the planet, and they're kept in a double-wide trailer outside Honolulu. So this is a really neat species. Cisco takes out a plastic tub, like at a pet store,

and pulls out a leaf with a tiny snail the size of a fingernail. Its shell is iridescent with gold and green. One of the most beautiful. They look really highly lacquered. Yeah, they're kind of jewel-like. Yeah, our tree snails are known as the jewels of the forest. This snail is extinct in the wild, which means this trailer is the only place it exists. The 40 other snail species here,

some are yellow or orange and of stripes, all are at risk. Most people, when they think endangered species going extinct, they think of pandas and tigers and elephants. But I mean, imagine having 40 different panda species that were all as rare as pandas are. That's what this facility is. There were once around 750 species of Hawaiian snails, almost all found nowhere else on the planet. They were so common, it's said they covered the trees like Christmas ornaments. And they're important in native Hawaiian culture. So in Hawaiian tradition, snails sing. They represent voice. And so they were probably one of the most revered invertebrates in the world.

Now, half of those species are extinct, and a hundred more are very close. So Sisko and his colleagues have been bringing them here for safekeeping, almost like an emergency room. It actually kind of sounds like one. Sorry, we have alarms. There are life support systems for the snails. If something goes wrong, Cisco and his team get alerts 24 hours a day, which is why he can never turn off his phone. It is super stressful. All of us feel it. People might think it's silly to feel that for snails, but if we mess up, it's over for a species. So yeah, I have sleepless nights.

This is the front line of the biodiversity crisis. It's just about stopping the bleeding. I don't think people realize how fast things are changing. Like it's happening like right now as I'm talking to you, there's species blinking out in the wild right now. Sisko says the eventual goal is to get these snails back into the wild. That's the mountains of Oahu. But there's something standing in the way. In a dense, rainy forest, Sisko shows me what it is. This is a Yuglandina, commonly known as a rosy wolf snail.

He's holding a larger snail with a pink shell, one that is not supposed to be in Hawaii. The rosy wolf snail was brought from Florida to control crop pests, but it's spread far and wide. And it's very good at eating native snails. It hunts them down by following the slime trails they leave behind. So the only way to create a safe space for native snails is to build a wall. So we're walking up to one of our fence units here. If rosy wolf snails are the velociraptors, this is the Jurassic Park fence. It's as tall as a person and has rough metal to stop predatory snails from climbing it. The fence surrounds a quarter acre

of forest to create a safe zone for native snails. And that means getting rid of all the rosy wolf snails inside. Sydney Stiefel is on the field team doing it, searching for them leaf by leaf. You're like on your hands and knees looking through. It's miserable, honestly. It's taken a year and a half of searching to ensure this patch of forest is safe. Cisco's team plans to release a native tree snail here next month. It's a small moment of hope in a long struggle. I think it's like caring for a critically ill patient or family member.

I would think it would be akin to like that kind of feelings that we go through. But he says just like a family member, giving up on them is not an option. That was NPR's Lauren Sommer. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott, Jordan Marie Smith, Emma Klein, and Mallory Yu. It was edited by Will Stone, Giselle Grayson, Christopher Intagliata, and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. And a reminder before we go, you can enjoy the Consider This newsletter. It breaks down a major story of the day and brings you the other stories you need to understand and enjoy the world. You can sign up at NPR.org slash Consider This Newsletter.

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