As many as a million different species are threatened with extinction. Is there anything we can do to stop them from vanishing forever? That’s the question at the center of an international summit kicking off this week in Montreal. Negotiators are gathering in Canada for a United Nations biodiversity conference, known as COP15, to work out a plan for preserving Earth’s fragile ecosystems. “We are waging war on nature,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a speech in Montreal. There is a lot on the line. Just life on Earth as we know it. Without some sort of intervention, scientists fear a mass extinction will occur, with dire implications for human beings. Here’s what you need to know: The summit’s headline goal is codifying a commitment from countries to preserve 30 percent of their land and water by 2030. That target has a pithy name: “30 by 30.” More broadly, conservationists see the meeting as their chance to hammer out an agreement akin to the Paris climate deal in 2015, when nations agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions - or at least try to. Climate change is intractably linked to extinction. Rising temperatures threaten to upend the habitats of everything from Antarctic penguins to tropical songbirds. Only by setting aside large swaths of forests and other ecosystems can wildlife thrive. But there are plenty of other issues to hash out, and much of the agreement’s text still needs to be negotiated by representatives of about 190 countries What counts as conserved area, for instance? Can wildlife be protected in ways that won’t infringe on the rights of Indigenous people to use ancestral lands? And how much should rich nations - ones that have already gained by harnessing natural resources - help out poor ones that are still developing? The biodiversity summit comes on the heels of a U.N. climate conference in Egypt where wealthy countries agreed to create a... |