This past month, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) issued a 168-page publication entitled Making Peace with Nature. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, comments in a Foreword that “Humanity is waging war on nature” and “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the...
In an earlier ‘Letter from the President’ in WellBeing News (October 2020), we mentioned that the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) has predicted that the production of animal products would have to double to meet global demand in 2050. This prediction...
A relatively recent saying, attributed to many different people, is that “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” In contrast, Peter Drucker, the global management guru, is quoted as saying that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” ...
An earlier issue of WellBeing News explored the shifting historical baselines phenomenon. This phenomenon illustrates the tendency of ecologists to use recent wildlife population numbers as the baseline for their studies, even though the recent wildlife population may be much lower than the population 50...
The UN World Tourism Agency published a report in 2015 on the importance of wildlife tourism to national economies in Africa. About half of global wildlife tourism involves a visit to an African country, resulting in 6 million tourists a year visiting Sub-Saharan Africa (about...
The total global catch of wild fish increased from 31 million metric tons in 1950 to a high of 130 million metric tons in 1996 before falling back to 109 million metric tons in 2010. However, from 1950 onwards, 366 of 1,519 fisheries collapsed (defined...
The Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC) is working to mainstream connectivity conservation solutions around the world that save biodiversity, increase resilience to climate change, and safeguard human health. To this end, CLLC supports the new IUCN Guidelines and the operations of the Connectivity Conservation...
Sustainability has become a popular term encompassing the notion that we need to promote and pursue policies that will allow future generations of humans to live and benefit from the wealth provided by the Earth. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted the 2030 Agenda...
For those interested in data and understanding current global challenges but who have not yet visited the website, Our World in Data, we would strongly urge spending some time browsing the site. This January a new article appeared addressing the very confusing issue of the...
Since 2015, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have served as a framework for a holistic approach to development that recognizes the need to incorporate non-economic measures of growth and human well-being. The SDG guidelines are a bold attempt to accomplish some of the most...
