Japan, the host nation for the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in October, has suggested adding a few more years to the UN’s awareness-raising efforts on the biodiversity crisis. Instead of having the International Year of Biodiversity conclude after this December, Japan says it will propose making 2010-2019 the International Decade of Biodiversity.
The announcement comes after a new UN report shows that biodiversity continues to decline worldwide threatening to ‘tip’ entire ecosystems such as coral reefs, the Amazon, and freshwater bodies. The report outlines how governments have missed their goal of 2010 to stem biodiversity loss.
“We want to promote the work (on preserving biodiversity) at the United Nations as a whole, including the United States, which is not party to the (biodiversity) convention,” Japan’s Environment Minister Sakihito Ozawa said last Friday according to The Mainichi Daily News.
Climate change, deforestation, habitat destruction, pollution, over-consumption of resources, invasive species, ocean acidification, poaching, bushmeat, overfishing, sprawl, dams, and mining are just some of the causes behind the global decline in biodiversity, which many scientists say will end in a mass extinction that rivaled the dinosaurs’.
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