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Minister for Heritage Malcolm Noonan traveled to the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, this week in Montreal, Canada, to negotiate new global goals to protect and restore nature.
A delegation from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) will join Minister Noonan for the event, which is hoped will deliver new targets for biodiversity to 2030.
A Green Party TD, the Minister highlighted that globally, 1m species – 25% of assessed plants and animals – are “threatened with extinction” and the majority of the world’s ecosystems are showing rapid declines.
He said the rate of global change in nature during the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history and called for “transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors”.
‘Crisis’
Highlighting the importance of the meeting, Minister Noonan warned that the “natural world is in crisis”.
“Biodiversity is being lost at a rate faster than when the dinosaurs went extinct. We are all completely dependent on the web of life – a complex, resilient yet fragile system that is the product of three and a half billion years of evolution.
“It gives us food, cleans our water, oxygenates our air, deals with our wastes and stores our carbon, plus it’s our first and best line of defence against climate change – but we’re destroying it.
“It’s absolutely imperative that we reverse the trajectory we’re on and come together as a global community to put the protection and restoration of nature where it belongs, at the heart of our decision-making,” he said.
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