Climate activists around the world are relentlessly pursuing global solidarity and transformational change with a clear and urgent message: act now to protect people and save our planet from the worst impacts of the climate crisis. As a tribute to those who persist, the Voices of Change series looks at the determination and drive of young people mobilizing for climate justice. It brings into perspective the severity of the vast and varying impacts of the climate crisis, while highlighting the growing movement to protect our future. As the world heads toward the next UN Climate Change Conference, which will take place in November in El-Sheikh, Egypt - the fourth African country to host the annual event since 1995 - the ten-part series explores the vision and values of climate activists and their courage to persevere, against all odds, and make invaluable contributions to the global climate movement.
The task now is to turn these commitments into real and meaningful action. This is the chief goal of Stockholm+50. The conference seeks to transformative change in our relationship with nature and our consumption and production patterns. It will also place a strong focus on meaningful youth engagement and addressing our intergenerational responsibility.
Climate change is commonly understood to be one of the drivers of extinction, affecting biodiversity in nearly every corner of the planet. But few realize that the loss of biodiversity is also exacerbating climate change, and shifting global weather patterns. Discover more about the relationship between wild nature and climate change in the paragraphs below.
Unlike technological and engineered solutions that are expensive and must be scaled-up in order to be effective, wild nature is already in place and working for free (as it has done for 500 million years) to produce everything life needs most to survive.
But we must act fast to leverage nature’s planetary healing power. Since the 1970s, contemporary scientists have observed that when, on average, more than half of an ecosystem is destroyed, the benefits produced from that ecosystem decline precipitously. Those benefits can include anything from oxygen production to water filtration to rainfall production to carbon storage. And some fragile ecosystems, like rainforests, require far more than 50% to maintain functionality. Scientists have concluded that the need to preserve at least half doesn’t just apply to individual landscapes, but actually is required across the entire planet. In order to keep Earth’s natural life-support system in place, including its benefits for weather and climate, we must keep at least half of Earth’s land and seas wild – free from industrial infrastructure. We must protect and restore wild nature in every country, region, and community. This means mobilizing private individuals to take action in their neighborhoods and cities as well as influencing elected leaders to do a better job at protecting public lands and expanding those protections to include critically important areas threatened by the imminent potential for destruction. Your voice, united with the voices of millions of others, is an essential part of solving the climate and extinction emergencies. We need you to let others know how much wild nature we need to secure the future of life on Earth.
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