Belgian ministers holding responsibility for the environment have launched a new platform called the Belgian Alliance for Diversity. Its goal is to increase awareness of all actions taken to preserve biodiversity.
A recently published report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London has unveiled some very disturbing facts about wildlife populations on our planet. The Living Planet Index, which is a data set that’s been around for fifty years already, between 1970 and 2018 animal populations across the globe have shrunk by no less than 69%. An astonishingly high number that should alarm us.
Some populations have even been able to multiply their numbers, according to the research team. Yet many others are having a hard time surviving and some parts of the world are more severely touched to this regard than others. Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a 94% average population loss and Africa dealt with a 66% decline. North America on the other hand experienced a 20% drop and both Europe and central Asia are dealing with a decrease of 18%.
During the 15th United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, which took place in Montreal, Canada last month the urgency to take action was at the forefront of the discussions, the Brussels Times reported. Governments and civil society were urged to take action.
The Belgian Biodiversity Alliance gathers public and private partners sharing the same vision and goal: to provide a common platform for tangible contributions by public and private actors in Belgium.
The Alliance wants to inspire and to mobilize the whole Belgian society in a very concrete way in the fight against the loss of biodiversity. The Alliance intends to bring together all those who are taking actions in our country to protect, restore and sustainably use biodiversity. It is an independent alliance with a governance emanating from the will of its partners. It is supported by a Secretariat through a non-profit association.
The network of actions and initiatives deployed across Belgium will contribute to achieving the regional, national, European and global ambitions for halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2050.
1. Main goals
- Collect and provide visibility to the multitude of efforts for biodiversity by a wide array of actors
- Provide a set of objectives that serve as beacon to inspire action
- Increase impact of individual actions as they collectively contribute to the common objectives
- Allow inspiring examples to be multiplied and scaled-up
- Encourage partnerships among public and private actors
- Kick-start implementation in Belgium of European and global biodiversity targets, in particular for the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (adopted at the Conference of the Parties in Montreal in December 2022)
The engagements are structured around a set of ten objectives that reflect the key issues on biodiversity in Belgium.
2. Two main axes
- Expanding the green-blue network in, around and between cities due to the significant impact of cities
- Making Belgian production and consumption more biodiversity-friendly
For the two axes, five quantified objectives have been developed. They provide an ambitious but realistic framework, based on existing targets at national and European levels. For each of the objectives, criteria are provided to validate and monitor the engagements.
