In Marseille, a crucial congress to act in the face of the biodiversity crisis – archyworldys

To provoke a general start in the face of one of the main threats weighing on the planet and on humanity. While wildlife is disappearing at an accelerated rate and almost all ecosystems have been altered, this is the challenge of the World Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which will open Friday September 3 in Marseille. This event, which will bring together scientists, members of civil society, representatives of indigenous peoples, politicians and business leaders until September 11, marks the opening of a crucial international sequence for the protection of the environment.

With the United Nations conference on biodiversity (COP15), scheduled for spring 2022 in China, it must generate the momentum essential to the fight against the collapse of living things. “We expect from this congress a new mobilization and a strong move to action, explains Sébastien Moncorps, the director of the French IUCN committee. There are no more uncertainties about the biodiversity crisis. The international conservation community has made concrete proposals to resolve it, and that must be translated into immediate implementation. “

Founded in 1948 in Fontainebleau, IUCN has 1,400 members, including around 100 States, and relies on a network of nearly 18,000 experts. Every four years, its congress is an opportunity to set the global priorities for the protection of nature.

More than a hundred resolutions – on the fight against imported deforestation, plastic pollution in marine environments, the protection of great apes, etc. – have already been adopted, and around twenty others have yet to be negotiated in Marseille.

“Warm-up tower”

But, beyond these discussions, this congress takes place in a context different from the previous ones, while the issue of ecosystem degradation is gradually gaining ground on the political agenda.

In 2019, the first major report of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned of the risk of rapid disappearance of a million animal and plant species, and described a current rate of extinction “At least tens or hundreds of times higher than what it has been on average for the last ten million years”.

Other scientific publications and the Red List of Threatened Species, regularly updated by the IUCN, have contributed to the start of awareness of the catastrophic state of the planet: in fifty years, the world’s populations of vertebrates have declined. an average of 68%, and France has lost 30% of its city and field bird populations in three decades.

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