Three years after the staggering record of one million endangered animal and plant species, the intergovernmental World Biodiversity Council IPBES is trying to draw attention to the still unchecked exploitation of many natural populations by humans in a new report.
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 plenary session in Bonn, which is currently only publicly available in the "Summary for political decision-makers",
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.
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A second major IPBES report on the overall economic value and assessment of natural resources is due to follow next Monday.
The first report, released today, looks solely at how people around the world use wildlife: whether by hunting wildlife, 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 about 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 do not have time to recover.
The southern hemisphere is particularly affected, especially the rural, poorest sections 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.
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.
The report points out particularly prominently that the millions and millions of members of indigenous peoples
have often developed their own strategies, for example agroforestry and hunting and fishing strategies in the respective natural areas in order to keep the 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 particularly effective in protecting wilderness areas in the tropics as “guardians of the forest”.
However, this did not prevent large-scale industrial overexploitation.
as long as their land and sovereign rights are protected, 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 particularly effective in protecting wilderness areas in the tropics as “guardians of the forest”.
However, this did not prevent large-scale industrial overexploitation.
as long as their land and sovereign rights are protected, 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 particularly effective in protecting wilderness areas in the tropics as “guardians of the forest”.
However, this did not prevent large-scale industrial overexploitation.