Bhubaneswar: The Sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16) kicked off in Cali, Colombia with a clarion call for action with experts warning that humanity is on the brink of shattering Earth’s limits and will suffer huge costs if biodiversity loss is not looked into with immediate effect. 

The event which is being held from October 21 to November 1 under the theme "Peace with Nature, saw scientists and academics from around the world warn that human activity has pushed the world into a danger zone. Discussing and negotiating the global crisis, they alerted that the stakes are high, and there is “no time to waste”.

 Elaborating on the imminent dangers lurking on the environmental front, scientists said seven out of eight indicators of planetary safety are in danger zone due to human activity which will only accelerate biodiversity loss. Not just that, the breakdown of the ecosystem will only exacerbate inequality and conflicts

Experts also warned that ecosystems are starting to approach tipping points where they shift into a new, degraded state with much less resilience. "In the past few years the abundance of nature has declined. It's insane the kind of tremendous change that is occuring with nature and species disappearing in the space of a few generations," said Tonthoza Uganja, a land restoration expert from Yesaya village in central Malawi.

Uganja went on to say,"Loss of biodiversity essentially becomes losing parts of ourselves as human beings as well. Our nature is our history and if we don't act, it will be a planet where we have lost our history. We’ve lost not just key species – we’ve lost our connectivity to the Earth. We are on the precipice of shattering Earth’s natural limits – we have not gone there yet, but we are right on the edge.”

Another expert expounded how the root causes of biodiversity loss lie in our worldviews – and this is also where he believes the solutions will be."We need to have more humility in our relationship as part of just one other species in the web of life. This is the only way the mass extinction threat can be addressed. WE need to restore what we have lost - the bedrock of pro-nature values," he said. 

Professor Rick Stafford from Bournemouth University, who is chair of the British Ecological Society policy committee, said he has watched the decline of key species he studies in his own lifetime. Recounting how he first went diving with sharks on the reefs of Indonesia 20 years ago but now “they’ve completely vanished, not just in Indonesia but other places”, he said their absence is the “new normal” but can have cascading effects for marine ecosystems.

 Stafford added that people don’t understand the urgency of biodiversity loss. "Biodiversity is not just “a ‘nice to have’ thing”. It’s actually an essential thing. We are very close to those sort of critical limits where we are not going to be able to recover that biodiversity, and it has really big effects on society – it is not just about being able to see some butterflies," he said.

 COP 16 is the first Biodiversity COP since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP 15 in December 2022 in Montreal, Canada. Parties to the Convention are expected to show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans with the Framework.

[Disclaimer: This story is a part of ‘Punascha Pruthibi – One Earth. Unite for It’, an awareness campaign by Sambad Digital.]