Biodiversity and ecosystems provide us with food, health and medicines, materials recreation, and wellbeing. Biodiversity is a key natural resource that filters our air and water, and acts as an indicator to notify us of the health status of our environment. Biodiversity is being lost across the globe because of unsustainable human activities. The global population of wild species has fallen by 60% over the last 40 years. One million species are at risk of extinction.
The new Biodiversity Strategy will work in tandem with the Farm to Fork Strategy alongside the improved CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) to achieve healthy and resilient ecosystems by 2050.
The new Biodiversity Strategy tackles the key drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable use of land and sea, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution, and invasive alien species. It also aims to make biodiversity considerations an integral part of the EU’s overall economic growth strategy.
The strategy brings forward concrete steps to put Europe’s biodiversity on the path to recovery by 2030, including:
- establishing protected areas for at least 30% of land in Europe and 30% of sea in Europe;
- Increasing organic farming and biodiversity-rich landscape features on agricultural lands;
- Halting and reversing the decline of pollinators;
- Reducing the use and risk of pesticides by 50% by 2030;
- Planting 3 billion trees by 2030;
- Restoring at least 25,000 km of EU rivers to a free-flowing state;
- Transforming at least 30% of Europe’s lands and seas into effectively managed protected areas and bringing back at least 10% of agricultural area under high-diversity landscape features.
Source: NRN & EU Commission
Image Source: NRN
