Nature For Life Hub
September 24-25, 28-29, 2020
A Message from WCS President and CEO Cristian Samper
Tune In
WCS broadcast the three events below on our Facebook page. For the full list of events over the four-day hub, visit the UN website.
Thursday, September 24
Nature for Health and Security
"It is primarily not about bat soup, pangolins or specific viruses," said WCS's Christian Walzer, "it is all about our interactions, exploitation and destruction of nature. It is about the interfaces—these edges of destruction—between humans, wildlife and nature in general."
Nature for Climate
The session focused on nature-based solutions to the climate crisis, which can provide up to 30% percent of the action needed by 2030 to keep global temperature rise below 2°C.
Shaunna Morgan Siegers
Indigenous Leadership Initiative
"Indigenous nations from across Canada are leading a movement in indigenous conservation. We are protecting lands on a sweeping scale across the boreal forest."
Monday, September 28
Nature Finance Forum
Funding an ambitious Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will require significant increases in financial resources from all sources, including official development assistance, governments’ domestic budgets, climate financing directed to nature-based solutions, philanthropies, corporations, and new sources of revenue or savings through regulatory and subsidy changes.
Funding Vital Landscapes
Day 3 of the Nature For Life Hub is all about finance because, when we invest in conservation, people and the planet thrive. More from members of our team around the world.
In the News
Protect Indigenous People’s Rights to Avoid a Sixth Extinction
The decisions Indigenous Peoples have made over generations, write WCS's David Wilkie, Susan Lieberman, and James Watson for Mongabay, have done more to protect species and ecological systems than all the protected areas established and managed by individual countries combined.
Piecemeal Perspectives on Preventing Future Zoonotic Pandemics Just Won’t Cut It
Our collective and determined actions can prevent outbreaks from becoming global pandemics, writes WCS Executive Director of Health Christian Walzer in Frontiers. But we, the global community, must strive to build back better.
Act Now
Since 2000, A Mexico-Sized Chunk of Intact Land Has Been Swallowed up by Humanity
"We need to proactively secure the last intact ecosystems on the planet, as these are critical in the fight to stop extinction and halt climate change.”
Act Now
IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT ALL FORESTS ARE EQUAL
By The New York Times
Programs would do well to preserve forests where deforestation and degradation haven’t begun.
COVID-19 Poses a Dual Threat to Indigenous Peoples
By David Wilkie
The media and the health response to the global pandemic has largely ignored Indigenous Peoples.
Risk of coronaviruses increases as wildlife moves from farms to restaurants
By The Independent
Evidence that the commercial wildlife trade for human consumption raises the risk of viruses to jumping between wildlife and people.
Preventing pandemics, global warming and environmental degradation all at once
By Lauren E. Oakes, Sarah H. Olson, & James Watson
One commonality lies at the core of these massive global challenges: the destructive relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Intact Forests
The most intact forests—those large, unbroken swaths of primary forests that are free of significant anthropogenic damage—represent less than a quarter of Earth’s remaining forest cover, and are disappearing at twice the rate of forests overall.
Further Reading
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