To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature

Earth’s cornucopia of life has evolved over 550 million years. Along the way, five mass extinction events have caused serious setbacks to life on our planet. The fifth, which was caused by a gargantuan meteorite impact along Mexico’s Yucatan coast, changed Earth’s climate, took out the dinosaurs and altered the course of biological evolution.

An aerial photo of Borneo shows deforestation
 and patches of remaining forest.

Today nature is suffering accelerating losses so great that many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is underway. Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth’s climate. 

My research focuses on ecosystems and climate change from regional to global scales. In a new study titled “A Global Deal for Nature,” led by conservation biologist and strategist Eric Dinerstein, 17 colleagues and I lay out a road map for simultaneously averting a sixth mass extinction and reducing climate change. 

Read the story from The Conversation by the Director of the Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science and Professor from the  Arizona State University, Greg Asner -  “To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature.”