Feyintoluwa Ayanlaja
Human existence on Earth has been plagued by one man-made disaster after another. As we speed towards a sixth mass extinction, the climate crisis is no longer imminent: it’s here. For years we have been exhausted with a multitude of climate change agreements with very little promise. Now, the year is 2020 and a Global Safety Net has been invented as a guaranteed way to save Earth.
What is the ‘Global Safety Net’ proposal?
Proposals, plans, conventions and so forth with the objective of remedying climate change have been sporadically formulated since 1988 — only a handful of them being materialised for their entirety.
However, we have never before seen a proposal for a global-scale analysis of all the terrestrial areas on Earth to prevent further losses to biodiversity: a Global Safety Net. This was proposed by Dr. Eric Dinerstein of RESVOLVE (a group working to resolve numerous social and ecological issues) and co-authors from around the world in an article published in the journal Science Advances.
This would bring protections to half of all of Earth’s land area
Dinerstein describes the Global Safety Net as being designed to “build upon the current network of protected areas” of Earth and incorporate currently unprotected areas to conserve its “biological wealth of Earth”. As the first digital map of its kind, it aims to “inoculate us from future biodiversity loss and future pandemics by conserving habitats where zoonotic diseases are likely to cross over with human populations”.
This safety net builds on Dinerstein’s 2019 work, ‘The Global Deal for Nature’. The Deal was an ambitious plan which called upon world leaders to protect half of Earth’s terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms by 2030. The Safety Net deals specifically with which areas of land need to be protected to meet the goals of the Global Deal.
Currently 15.1% of land area is protected. The Safety Net is truly global as it amount to an additional 35%. This would bring protections to half of all of Earth’s land area.
The Global Safety Net will help meet the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement which was created to strengthen the global response towards the threat of climate change in December of 2015. It will achieve this through the prevention of future biodiversity losses, CO2 emission from land conversion and enhance natural carbon removal to limit a further temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
How achievable is this?
Timebound by 2030, the scientists at RESOLVE have a decade to complete the objectives of the Global Safety Net; that is to discover and formally conserve and reduce human contact with an additional 35% of terrestrial land on Earth. Such an ambitious proposal forces you to wonder: how achievable is this really?
Inspired by the motto, “think globally, act locally”, the Global Safety Net claims to offer a way for humanity to “catch up and rebound” and to align with the needs of the planet by working from the “ground up” — by district, state, province and nation.
But, how will they reach this land? How will they go about conserving this land? Can a Global safety Net be created in time?
Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the total human population yet manage over a quarter of the world’s land surface
According to the scientists behind the proposal themselves, “there are reasons to support the notion that a Global Safety Net is achievable”. Research from the World Economic Forum revealed that half of the world’s gross domestic product, which amounts to, $44 trillion dollars is at least moderately dependant on “nature and its services”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how possible it is for world governments to mobilize trillions of dollars. More money could be made available for the climate crisis with the expected reduction of the $4.7 trillion per year in fossil fuel subsides that decline under new regulations in the Paris Agreement.
And what about indigenous lands; how will they take the sanctity of their areas and beliefs into consideration?
The role that indigenous people play on the preservation of land is often undermined. Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the total human population yet manage over a quarter of the world’s land surface. This area contains around 80% of Earth’s biodiversity.
Indigenous-claimed land makes up 37% of the proposed lands for increased conservation. The Global Safety Net has no intention on taking over control of land managed by indigenous communities. Indeed, the team recognise that indigenous communities play a vital role in the conservation of their lands and should continue to act as “essential guardians of nature”.
The current truth: Climate Crisis
2020 has so far seen only the tip of the melting iceberg; a climate crisis intensified by the Coronavirus pandemic which brought with it a climate of anxiety as well as a risk of “more masks than jellyfish” in our oceans.
“The climate crisis is now rapidly becoming a comprehensive catastrophe”
As we have transcended the boundaries of our planet, exploiting her beyond reason, we have proved it impossible to have a benign residency on Earth. We cut down trees, we burn fossil fuels, we hunt, and we litter, a combination which has contributed to the exponential rising of the global temperature which will soon go past the point-of-no-return if we continue as we have been.
Ignored and archived for decades and decades, the climate crisis has only exacerbated with time. But as the crisis has undeniably maimed our planet with forest fires and alarmingly hot summers, we are being forced to take the issue more seriously. The Prince of Wales warned “the climate crisis is now rapidly becoming a comprehensive catastrophe that will dwarf the impact of the coronavirus pandemic”. Under the same light, British lawyer Farhana Yamin from Extinction Rebellion pleads vehemently, we should be hopeful that “we can restore nature together” and “redesign human societies” such that no one is left behind.
It has become the defining issue of our lifetimes but, with enough effort, cooperation and steadfast action, the climate crisis will be a crisis for not much longer. Will the Global Safety Net be the climate change proposal that saves Earth? Only time will tell.
Feyintoluwa Ayanlaja
Featured Photo by Kunal Shinde on Unsplash. Image licence found here. No changes made to this image.
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