Biodiversity underpins most of the world’s economic activities, particularly in the agri-food sector, so the pace of its erosion must be contrasted with holistic, coherent, and collective efforts, FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said.
“Its loss undermines global efforts to tackle poverty and hunger – no biodiversity, no food diversity,” he said in a video address to the UN Summit on Biodiversity.
Qu spoke on behalf of several UN agencies and represented the United Nations system while participating in a Leaders Dialogue on how to mainstream biodiversity issues into the broader drive for sustainable development.
The UN summit, engaging Heads of State and Government, comes at the end of the UN Decade on Biodiversity and aims to galvanize and accelerate concrete commitments and action at the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Kunming, China, in 2021, where members should adopt the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.
The sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits from biodiversity are critical for delivery of 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, some 70 percent of drugs used for cancer are natural or synthetic products inspired by nature, and the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how degraded biodiversity undermines the web of life and increases the risk of disease spillovers from wildlife to people.
Joining the call for urgent action, FAO’s Director-General emphasized the “need to radically transform our economies and behaviors to make sure that they are inclusive, green, and sustainable.”
He emphasized the important links between this summit and the UN Food Systems Summit to be held next year, noting that the futures of our agri-food systems and biodiversity are mutually dependent on transforming the former as well as “reverence of nature” adding that “It is time to bridge our agendas.”
Today, only nine crop species supply nearly 66 percent of total global crop production, while only eight domesticated mammalian and avian species provide more than 95 percent of the human food supply from livestock, according to FAO’s extensive work on biodiversity. Reliance on such a narrow set of resources reduces natural insurance effects and weakens the resilience of food security over the long run.
Original source: FAO
