From The Brock News, November 24, 2015

Imagine drafting a set of guidelines that would advise all governments and private sectors in the world on how to govern ecosystems. Picture doing this in a small group of people speaking various languages under a tight deadline with a huge goal at stake: to reduce, and prevent, the increasingly negative impacts of climate change.

This is what Brock University biologist and Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC) member Liette Vasseur recently experienced. She was one of seven experts from around the globe who co-wrote the Beijing Declaration on Governing Ecosystems for Human Wellbeing.

She and her colleagues based the declaration on material coming from discussions among 150 experts who met in Beijing, China last month at the first-ever World Forum on Ecosystem Governance.

The Beijing Declaration will be presented at the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change, or “COP 21,” scheduled to be held in Paris, France Nov. 30 – Dec. 11.

“Climate change is a global problem,” says Vasseur, who also holds a UNESCO Chair in Community Sustainability. “It has to be treated seriously. We cannot go on and put our head in the sand like we have been doing until now.”

The Beijing Declaration’s essential premise is that natural ecosystems play a “crucial role” in meeting basic human needs and wellbeing.

But environmental mismanagement has led to a situation where 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystem services are degraded or being used wastefully. “Ecosystem services” are the benefits – clean water, food, recreation, energy, medicines, etc. – that people get from the environment.

Vasseur focused on how good ecosystem governance supports the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which cover everything from eradicating poverty to increasing access to health care, food, education, employment, energy and many other basics across the globe by 2030.

“Without a healthy ecosystem, we’ll never achieve the SDGs and we’ll never achieve climate change adaptation and mitigation,” says Vasseur.

“We have to understand and acknowledge that there are connections between humans and the ecosystem. We have to protect the ecosystem and look at nature-based solutions instead of only looking at economic development and technology.”

Some of these “nature-based solutions” include restoration, replanting trees, protecting wetlands and prohibiting construction in ecologically sensitive areas.

Another key point made in the Beijing Declaration is that “we need quality education on environmental climate change and ecosystem governance issues from kindergarten to the post-secondary level,” says Vasseur.

And, community involvement is key to successful environmental management, says Vaseur. “We may have all the best national policies in the world, but by the end, who will be really doing actions? It’s the local population.”

The Beijing Declaration on Governing Ecosystems for Human Wellbeing outlines principals, goals and recommended actions on managing the environment, achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and addressing climate change impacts.

Some of these include:

• integrate reforestation, protection of wetlands, green-belt zoning and other “nature-based solutions” into national economic development plans
• include sustainability and environmental lessons in school curricula with the aim of influencing behaviour change
• delegate environmental management and accountability to local people
• increase investment in “green” activities
• promote innovative, nature-based sector funds

The World Forum on Ecosystem Governance and its resulting Beijing Declaration on Governing Ecosystems for Human Wellbeing is a partnership of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM), the Chinese State Forestry Administration (SFA) and the Beijing Municipal Government.

Regarding climate change, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA).

Its “Global Climate Change” website lists a wide range of climate change facts and other information, including:

• Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers of ice between 2002 and 2005
• since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 per cent. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year
• the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record (1880-2014) have all occurred since 2000, with the exception of 1998. The year 2014 ranks as the warmest on record