The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration!

By S R Ranjan: Why the call for action to save the ecosystem? Why do we need to keep telling the world for the same thing — to conserve and restore ecosystems — again and again? Well! “We are reaching the point of no return for the planet,” warns UN secretary general Antonio Guterres. “The humanity faces a ‘triple environmental emergency’ of biodiversity loss, climate disruption and escalating pollution, now is the time to act,” says Antonio Guterres.

The world’s ecosystems are being degraded at an accelerating rate and we face severe challenges to protect livelihoods and the well-being of today’s and future generations. We don’t have a choice. The pathway, besides ecosystem restoration, is to take sustainable global actions that are not only critical for climate change mitigation and biodiversity, but also for the global economy, health, food security and clean water.

To counter the ‘triple environmental emergency’ the United Nations (UN) launched ‘Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’ with a goal to ‘prevent, halt and reverse’ ecosystem degradation worldwide for the people nature and climate. The UN Decade — led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — aims to put the world on track for a sustainable future and put into force a global movement, involving policy level interventions, building political momentum and fostering worldwide collaborative initiatives on the ground for ecosystem restoration.

The UN Decade — 2021 to 2030 — has been identified by scientists and experts as the timeline for a last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. They say that the time is running out, just preventing and conserving what’s left of the ecosystem is not good enough, we need to take every action to also restore it. This will give us the chance to stop the collapse of biodiversity and counteract climate change.

Alongside the decade launch, a new report — Becoming #GenerationRestoration: Ecosystem Restoration for People, Nature and Climate — was released which presents evidence on the state of global ecosystem destruction and explains why ecosystem restoration is so imperative today. It calls on the world to restore degraded land in the next decade.

The report shows that far from being a ‘nice to have’, ecosystem restoration is needed on a large scale in order to achieve the sustainable development agenda. The well-being of future generations is being threatened due to over-exploitation of natural resources which is embedded in economies and governance systems.

“Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century,” said António Guterres.

(Singh Rakesh Ranjan)

Freelance Journalist

(Representational images: source)