Harnessing the power of Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)-accredited organizations across 46 states that reach 200 million people each year, the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced #FramingOurFuture – a partner-based campaign aimed at zoo visitors, as well as digital audiences, and how their actions to protect nature will support our climate.
The campaign kicked off at COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
The goals of the campaign are to educate and empower the public to take action on climate by advancing nature-based solutions in U.S. foreign and domestic climate policy, including protection of intact forests and restoration of coastal ecosystems. In addition, the campaign supports doubling U.S. investments in global biodiversity conservation funding streams that support nature-based solutions to climate change over the next four years.
As Cristian Samper, WCS President and CEO, said in a statement: “Nature-based approaches, such as protection of intact forests, serve as one-third of the immediate solution to the climate crisis. However, they only receive 8% of climate change mitigation resources globally. To ensure U.S. policymaking, investment and diplomacy advances the role of nature in mitigating climate change, we need dedicated action, not only of scientists and policymakers but of ordinary citizens from coast to coast.”
The campaign emphasizes that by saving nature, in particular protecting intact forests and restoring coastal ecosystems, we can achieve one-third of the action needed to keep global temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2030. The climate crisis today is directly connected to a growing biodiversity crisis. The United Nations has suggested that as many as a million animal and plant species face extinction today. Driving the threat to biodiversity is the destruction and degradation of countless intact landscapes that provide habitat for species large and small and store carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
Such intact areas are likewise a key reservoir of viral pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, to which people have no natural immunity. The opportunity for “zoonotic” spillover of such viruses from wildlife to humans is greatly increased as the integrity of large swaths of forest is compromised — largely through the carving up of such areas for industrial agriculture, resource extraction and transportation infrastructure as well as via the illegal wildlife trade.
Added John Calvelli, WCS executive vice president for public affairs: “The zoo and aquarium community will come together to ensure that the conservation of nature is a key component to fighting the climate crisis, which is directly linked to the extinction and pandemic crises. We must begin actively framing our future. Protecting tomorrow starts today.”
For more, visit wcs.org or call 347-840-1242.
