Accelerating extinction

“Conservation efforts around the world have slowed the hemorrhaging of species, but there is still a long way of stopping it. The extinction rate continues to accelerate.”

-Edward Wilson’s “Half-Earth”

Environmental campaigns in Korea fall on deaf ears before large-scale government-driven projects fueled by politics and economics. The situation is no different for regional development projects of smaller scale. Though no one would openly oppose environmental conservation, the claim to give up development-related benefits for the sake of conservation is not supported. How many environmental campaigns have been kept so far? Would they be supported going forward?

The author, claiming that the pace of extinction would be faster in the future, sets a more ambitious target. He says that creating half of the earth’s space as conservation areas is the only solution to prevent the sixth extinction. Also, he pleaded with those trying to expand conservation areas to make extra efforts. Wilson passed away in 2023 without witnessing the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Diversity Framework, hailed as a historical process.

The international community is working hard to preserve the area of Earth as a conservation area by 2050. It is working to come up with space plans and financial support. Europe passed the Nature Restoration Law in July this year, which legalizes efforts to achieve biodiversity goals by 2030, while China and Japan agreed to remove WTO’s environmentally harmful subsidies. The final recommendation draft for the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), which requires businesses to disclose their impact on natural assets owned by companies, will be released in September.

Let us start by revisiting our tepid approach to environmental conservation. Next, we should prepare ourselves to overcome our limitations in new international waves of change and achieve more ambitious targets. The pace of extinction will only accelerate with failures by the current generation.