Seán McDonagh – Making Peace With Nature

Seán MacDonagh’s article from The Tablet 30 Dec 2020:

The year ahead: the environment

https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/19157/making-peace-with-nature

Full article below:

The year ahead: the environment

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.” The apocalyptic nature of what is happening to our world was captured by the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, in a virtual address on the state of our planet that he gave at Columbia University, New York, a few weeks ago, writes Sean McDonagh.

We are waging this war without understanding the consequences either for humanity, or the planet. As Guterres points out, biodiversity is collapsing, with one million species facing extinction. In Australia’s Black Summer bushfire last year, it is estimated that three billion koalas, kangaroos and other animals were killed or displaced. Dr Lily van Eeden, one of the researchers who took part in the study, said that she couldn’t think of a worse fire for wildlife: “If we think about known mass mortalities of animals, I’m not aware of anything that compares.”

In August, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported more than 7,000 fires, the second largest wildfire season in history, creating havoc. Many scientists thought that the Arctic fires in the summer of 2019 were a once-off occurrence, with computer models predicting it would not happen again until 2050. The Arctic fires of 2020 proved these projections wrong. It now appears that in future these fires will start earlier and end later.

Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes; deserts are spreading, wetlands are being lost and we are losing 10 million hectares of forest each year. Every marine ecosystem is being destroyed by plastic pollution.

The UN Convention on Biodiversity aims to protect biodiversity by using the diversity of nature without destroying it and sharing any benefits from genetic diversity equally. The fifteenth UN Biodiversity Conference – COP15 – had been scheduled to take place in Kunming in China last October but because of Covid-19 was postponed to 17-30 May this year. It is due to end before the UK hosts COP26 in Glasgow in November, and one of the goals of COP15 is for nature-based solutions to contribute significantly to achieving the targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change. It is estimated that there are almost 300 global, regional and local conventions aimed at protecting biodiversity, locally and globally. These must be strengthened.

The last few decades have given us a host of pandemics, from Covid-19 to Sars, Mers, Ebola, HIV, Zika and H1N1. Because of the way humans are colonising every ecosystem we can expect more frequent pandemics – because degraded ecosystems favour creatures such as bats and rodents that carry these diseases to the human population.

To avoid the next pandemic we must control the enormous global wildlife trade, eradicate illegal bushmeat, and protect forests. This would benefit the global economy significantly according to a report by the intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It estimates that implementing these policies would cost between $40-58 billion each year – but the report claims that the Covid-19 pandemic had cost the global economy up to $9 trillion by July 2020. However, the health benefits for humanity are even more important. If we continue our attack on nature, the next virus to cross over to infect humans might be as infectious as Covid-19 and more deadly than Sars.

Our world is under threat, and it is the poorest and most vulnerable – even in rich countries – who are facing the brunt of the consequences. As Pope Francis writes in Let Us Dream: “For a long time we carried on thinking we could be healthy in a world that was sick. But the [pandemic] has brought home how important it is to work for a healthy world … The green and the social go hand in hand. The fate of Creation is tied to the fate of all humanity.”

In his address, António Guterres declared: “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the twenty-first century.” And, he added, echoing Pope Francis, “ultimately this is a moral test … We cannot use [our] resources to lock in policies that burden [future generations] with a mountain of debt on a broken planet.”

There are signs of hope. The US President-elect, Joe Biden, has signalled his intention to hitch the United States back to the wagon of the Paris Agreement, to pursue a green recovery from Covid. Biden along with countries including China and the UK, and the EU, have adopted targets of reaching net-zero emissions around the middle of the century.

Renewable energy is now as cheap as coal in many regions, and new technologies such as electric cars are gaining pace. By the end of 2021 we will have a clearer idea of whether or not the world is truly committed to rising to the greatest scientific, political and moral challenge it has faced.

Sean McDonagh is a Columban missionary priest and President of An Taisce – the National Trust for Ireland.