We are currently living through the sixth mass extinction.
Man-made interventions such as climate change, land-system change (urban development, deforestation, monocrops), and introduction of novel entities (e.g. plastics and chemical pollution) have breached the Earth’s planetary boundaries of safe operating levels, leading to cascading reduction of biological diversity.
Today, the UN’s COP15 on Biodiversity kicking off in Montreal will be the biggest UN biodiversity conference in a decade. The aim is to agree on a plan for worldwide action to reverse the alarming trend of biodiversity loss by 2030. This plan is known as the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
Specifically, The UN biodiversity convention has three official objectives: the conservation of biodiversity, its sustainable use, and the equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the use of genetic resources. The overall ambition of this edition is to increase protected areas from 15% of land and 7% of the ocean to 30% for both by 2030.
As always, private innovations, including biodiversity startups, will play their part in tackling some of our biggest challenges.
Our latest landscape maps the startups focused on tackling biodiversity, including those working in supply chain tracking, rewilding, environmental DNA, weather risk & wildfire prediction, marine biodiversity and more.
Plus we’re also tracking 46 bee and pollination startups. #SaveTheBees 🐝