Climate: Nature is a valuable ally

Source: Climate: Nature is a valuable ally

The global climate summit’s declaration on fossil fuels got all the headlines this month in Dubai. But nature scored quite a win of its own.

In the final agreement, attendees of COP28 recognized that climate change threatens ecosystems and the billions of people who depend on them. They also committed to halting all deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, as well as the destruction of other land and marine ecosystems.

In a first, negotiators also aligned the climate declaration with a separate agreement to protect biodiversity that includes goals such as safeguarding 30 percent of the world’s land and seas.

“The ministers chose today to break from traditional silos and to pursue strategies that put nature at the heart of climate change responses,” Joe Walston, the executive vice president of Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement.

Nature can be harnessed in the struggle to curb global warming and its most tragic effects in myriad ways: Forests store carbon and reduce temperatures, coral reefs help shield coasts from extreme weather, and grasslands safeguard water sources from droughts.

But to fully protect various ecosystems and help them combat climate change, we have to understand them — and there’s a lot to figure out. For example, scientists estimate that a staggering 91 percent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and 80 percent of the oceans remain unmapped.