DThree years after the staggering record of one million existentially threatened animal and plant species, the intergovernmental World Biodiversity Council IPBES is attempting in a new report to draw attention to the continued unchecked exploitation of many natural populations by humans. Strategies are also being formulated for the first time, albeit very vaguely, as to how the unsustainable overexploitation of wild animal and plant populations is to be prevented.
85 natural and social scientists from 33 countries, together with 200 experts, evaluated almost 7,000 individual publications and reports over a period of four years. In the end, the final report presented at the IPBES plenum in Bonn, which is currently only publicly available in the “Summary for political decision-makers”, was accepted by the representatives from 139 countries.
A second major IPBES report on the aggregate economic value and assessment of natural resources is due to follow on Monday. The first report, published this Friday, looks solely at how people around the world use wild species: be it by hunting wild animals, fishing, logging in primary forests and collecting plants, fungi and algae. Non-invasive use of wildlife species and areas such as whale tourism will also be highlighted.
In total, humans use around 50,000 species for their purposes, 10,000 of them directly for food. According to the surveys of the past decades, two thirds of them have not been used sustainably. In other words, the natural populations are shrinking more and more because the stocks don’t have time to recover. The global south is particularly hard hit, and especially the rural, poorest parts of the population. “Even if not all questions are scientifically answered and not all knowledge gaps are filled, we have to act. Now!” said the Norwegian co-chair of the IPBES report, Marla R. Emery, in Bonn.
Crime scene Brazil: Logs are stacked in Porto Velho at a sawmill surrounded by recently charred and deforested fields.
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Image: dpa
A good 70 percent of the poorest in the world depend directly on the use of natural resources in wilderness areas for their livelihood. One in five people depend on plants and algae for their livelihood, 2.4 billion people have to heat and cook with wood, and 90 percent of the 120 million people who make a living from fishing do this in small and by no means in industrial companies .
But here too, in the most remote, economically least advanced regions of the Global South and the less industrialized North, one of the keys to slowing down the unsustainable exploitation of nature may lie, according to the report. According to the report, the millions and millions of members of indigenous peoples have often developed their own strategies, such as agroforestry, hunting and fishing strategies, in their natural areas in order to keep resources in a stable balance.
As long as their land and sovereign rights are protected, the indigenous cultures protect the continued existence of biodiversity on 38 million square kilometers worldwide – or on 40 percent of the global nature conservation areas on land. According to the report, the indigenous people have proven themselves particularly as “guardians of the forest” in the protection of wilderness areas in the tropics. However, this did not prevent large-scale industrial overexploitation.