Kategorie: News
An unusual idea for coral protection
To save coral reefs from climate change, researchers are proposing an unusual idea: Coral protection should be declared a human right. Christian Voolstra, a biologist from Constance and President of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS), explains why this could work.
Corals are threatened with extinction. A large-scale coral die-off in the Great Barrier Reef recently caused a stir this spring, but in previous years the warming of the oceans had already led to so-called coral bleaching worldwide. Coral researcher Christian Voolstra from the University of Konstanz assumes that we will lose more than 90 per cent of all corals by the end of the century: a mass extinction of one of the most important marine ecosystems, with dramatic consequences for millions of animal species and microorganisms - and also for humans.
Christian Voolstra and other scientists are now proposing an unusual means of saving the coral reefs: Coral conservation should be declared a human right. In an interview, Voolstra, who is also President of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS), reveals what corals have to do with human rights and why the measure would actually accelerate coral protection. An extensive article with the detailed recommendations was also published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology.
Link to the study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17512
Failed species conservation conference
Not exactly the same subject area but with a high degree of overlap due to the coral and reef landscapes in need of protection - the current 2024 Species Conservation Conference has unfortunately failed.
Species conservation conference ends without agreement: On Saturday, 2/11/2024, the World Conference on Nature (COP16) came to an end in Cali, Colombia - but without any concrete results. In particular, the major issue of financing measures to combat environmental destruction and global species extinction remained unresolved. The reason: many participants left the conference before the vote.
The conference was actually supposed to end on Friday. However, the President of COP16, Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamadz, had extended it in order to reach an agreement on the financing of species conservation after all. Negotiations were to continue ‘until victory’, the President announced the day before.
On Saturday, however, she had to admit failure. She declared the conference closed as the necessary quorum for voting could no longer be achieved. Many of the approximately 23,000 delegates left the conference early because they wanted to catch their booked flights home.
A spokesperson for COP16 said that the meeting would be continued at a later date. The topics on which an agreement has yet to be reached should be dealt with at that time. The next species conservation conference will not take place for another two years.
The two-week conference with the motto ‘Peace with Nature’ focussed on financing issues as well as the implementation of the biodiversity framework adopted two years ago. In Montreal in 2022, around 200 countries agreed on 23 targets to be achieved by 2030.
The negotiators were/are apparently unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Without sufficient financial resources, nature conservation is toothless,’ said Greenpeace species conservation expert Ursula Bittner. And further: “It must be clear to the international community: without intact ecosystems, there is no life on this planet.” Especially in the context of the worldwide damage to coral reefs and marine ecosystems, this is unfortunately a very frustrating situation in global nature conservation.