By Catrin Einhorn

NEW YORK – The world is failing to address a catastrophic biodiversity collapse that not only threatens to wipe out beloved species and invaluable genetic diversity, but endangers humanity’s food supply, health and security, according to a sweeping United Nations report issued on Tuesday (15).

When governments act to protect and restore nature, the authors found, it works. But despite commitments made 10 years ago, nations have not come close to meeting the scale of the crisis, which continues to worsen because of unsustainable farming, overfishing, burning of fossil fuels and other activities.

“Humanity stands at a crossroads,” the report said.

It comes as the devastating consequences that can result from an unhealthy relationship with nature are on full display: A pandemic that very likely jumped from bats has upended life worldwide, and wildfires, worsened by climate change and land management policies, are ravaging the American West.

“These things are a sign of what is to come,” said David Cooper, an author of the report and the deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the global treaty underlying the assessment. “These things will only get worse if we don’t change course.”

The report looked at a decade of efforts by national governments. In 2010, after painstaking scientific work and arduous negotiation, almost every country in the world signed on to 20 goals under the convention to staunch the biodiversity haemorrhage.

The report, which assesses progress on the 20 goals, has found that the world is doing far too little. At the global level, only six of the biodiversity convention’s 20 targets were partially achieved and none were fully achieved.

The destruction of habitats such as forests, mangroves and grasslands was not cut in half. Overfishing did not decrease. Governments did not stop subsidizing fossil fuels, fertilizers and pesticides that are contributing to the biodiversity crisis.

Indeed, the report estimates that governments around the world spend $500 billion per year on environmentally harmful initiatives, while total public and private financing for biodiversity came to a fraction of that: $80 billion to $90 billion.

“Many governments, within their ministry of environment, have a lot of ambition for biodiversity,” said Anne Larigauderie, an ecologist who attended the conference in 2010 that adopted the 20 targets. “But they don’t have enough power compared to the other ministries: agriculture, transportation, energy.”

-New York Times