The United Nations new scorecard found that the world has largely failed to meet 20 different targets to safeguard species and ecosystems. Six of those 20 goals were “partially achieved,” and the rest were not. The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 report, published by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), reveals the world has failed to meet a series of key targets set a decade ago to save the world’s biodiversity. In 2010, a total of 20 ‘Aichi Targets’ were developed and hailed as the blueprint for saving life on Earth.

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the director of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said, “Things have to change. The rate of biodiversity loss is unprecedented in human history and pressures are intensifying. Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. If we take action, the right action, as the report proposes, we can transition to a sustainable planet.”

Last year the UN’s panel on biodiversity, called IPBES, warned that one million species face extinction as a man-made activity has already severely degraded three-quarters of land on Earth. The report was originally slated to be released at a U.N. conference to set biodiversity targets for the next decade, but the event in Kunming, China, was postponed until next year due to the pandemic.

The World Wildlife Fund’s 2020 Living Planet Report estimated that globally, populations of nearly 21,000 species of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians plummeted by an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. “It certainly raises a significant amount of concern that we’re potentially looking at a very large extinction event if we can’t reverse some of these trends,” says Thomas Lacher, a conservation biologist at Texas A&M University and a member of the Red List Committee.

The report published by the UN CBD sets out eight ways to help transform the natural world and move towards making the planet more sustainable, these include:

  • The land and forests transition: conserving, restoring, combatting and reversing degradation, and reduce and mitigate land-use change.
  • The sustainable agriculture transition: redesigning agricultural systems to enhance productivity while minimizing negative impacts on biodiversity.
  • The sustainable food systems transition: enabling sustainable and healthy diets with a greater emphasis on a diversity of foods, mostly plant-based and to cut the waste in food supply and consumption.
  • The sustainable fisheries and oceans transition: protecting and restoring marine and coastal ecosystems to ensure sustainability, and to enhance food security and livelihoods
  • The cities and infrastructure transition: deploying “green infrastructure” to improve the health and quality of life for citizens and to reduce the environmental footprint of cities and infrastructure
  • The sustainable freshwater transition: an integrated approach guaranteeing the water flows required by nature and people, improving water quality to allow the recovery of freshwater systems from mountains to coasts
  • The sustainable climate action transition: employing nature-based solutions, alongside a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use, providing positive benefits for biodiversity and other sustainable development goals
  • The biodiversity-inclusive One Health transition: managing ecosystems, including agricultural and urban ecosystems, as well as the use of wildlife, to promote healthy ecosystems and healthy people.