Just before Christmas, 196 countries signed the Kunming-Montreal agreement on how to reverse the biodiversity crisis, in the same way that the 2015 Paris Agreement set targets on how to reverse the climate crisis. The agreement sets a number of overarching goals for how to improve biodiversity globally by 2030, partly by conserving existing biodiversity and partly by restoring that which has been lost.
Denmark’s challenges with nature management
These are very general goals, and it will now be interesting to see how the individual countries will implement these goals in their daily nature management. This also applies to Denmark, which for many years has been very poor at looking after nature and which, in a list of how good the EU countries are at looking after their natural areas, is in a woeful second-to-last place. An unfamiliar place for those of us who, in our own self-image, are supposed to be very green and advocates for more wild nature.
Need for action and link to the climate crisis
But with the new, ambitious global goals that Denmark supports, we need to take a step back. The most significant target is probably that 30 percent of the world’s land and marine areas must be protected by 2030. It’s hugely ambitious and will probably be difficult to achieve. But it sends a clear signal to countries. Now all the fine words need to be translated into action. And it’s urgent if we want to have any hope of halting the decline and achieving a sustainable relationship with the nature we are so dependent on. And let’s not forget that if we don’t solve the biodiversity crisis, we can’t solve the climate crisis either. The two crises are inextricably linked and must be solved together.
Denmark’s contribution to the Global Goals
Although the 30 percent protected nature cannot be transferred to all countries on a one-to-one basis, it will be a great challenge for Denmark to make a serious contribution to the common goal. Currently, around 60 percent of Denmark’s land area is covered by agriculture, 15 percent is zoned for cities and roads, and almost 15 percent is left as forest, but mostly as production forest, which is not very exciting for biodiversity. Read the rest of the post at Kristeligt Dagblad.
