AFP UK

Trapped on island habitats made smaller by rising seas, Indonesia’s Komodo dragons were listed as “endangered” on Saturday, in an update of the wildlife Red List that also warned overfishing threatens nearly two-in-five sharks with extinction. 

About 28 percent of the 138,000 species assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)  are now at risk of vanishing in the wild forever, as the destructive impact of human activity on the natural world deepens.

But the latest update of the Red List for Threatened Species also highlights the potential for restoration, with four commercially-fished tuna species pulling back from a slide towards extinction after a decade of efforts to curb over-exploitation. 

The most spectacular recovery was seen in Atlantic bluefin tuna, which leapt from “endangered” across three categories to the safe zone of “least concern”. 

The species — a mainstay of high-end sushi in Japan — was last assessed in 2011. 

“This shows that conservation works — when we do the right thing, a species can increase,” said Jane Smart, global director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group.

“But we must remain vigilant. This doesn’t mean we can have a free-for-all of fishing for these tuna species.”

– ‘Clarion call’ –

A key message from the IUCN Congress, taking place in the French city of Marseille, is that disappearing species and the destruction of ecosystems are existential threats on a par with global warming.

And climate change itself is threatening the futures of many species, particularly endemic animals and plants that live on small islands or in certain biodiversity hotspots. 

Komodo dragons — the largest living lizards — are found only in the World Heritage-listed Komodo National Park and neighbouring Flores. 

The species “is increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change” said the IUCN: rising sea levels are expected to shrink its tiny habitat at least 30 percent over the next 45 years. 

Outside of protected areas, the fearsome  throwbacks are also rapidly losing ground as humanity’s footprint expands. 

“The idea that these prehistoric animals have moved one step closer to extinction due in part to climate change is terrifying,” said Andrew Terry, Conservation Director at the Zoological Society of London. 

Their decline is a “clarion call for nature to be placed at the heart of all decision making” at crunch UN climate talks in Glasgow, he added.

– ‘An alarming rate’ –

The most comprehensive survey of sharks and rays ever undertaken, meanwhile, revealed that 37 percent of 1,200 species evaluated are now classified as directly threatened with extinction, falling into one of three categories: “vulnerable”, “endangered” or “critically endangered”. 

That’s a third more species at risk than only seven years ago, said Simon Fraser University Professor Nicholas Dulvy, lead author of a study published on Monday underpinning the Red List assessment.

“The conservation status of the group as a whole continues to deteriorate, and overall risk of extinction is rising at an alarming rate,” he told AFP.

Five species of sawfish — whose serrated snouts get tangled in cast off fishing gear — and the iconic shortfin mako shark are among those most threatened.

Chondrichthyan fish, a group made up mainly of sharks and rays, “are important to ecosystems, economies and cultures,” Sonja Fordham, president of Shark Advocates International and co-author of the upcoming study, told AFP.

“By not sufficiently limiting catch, we’re jeopardising ocean health and squandering opportunities for sustainable fishing, tourism, traditions and food security in the long term.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization reports some 800,000 tonnes of sharks caught — intentionally or opportunistically — each year, but research suggests the true figure is two to four times greater.

– Conservation tracker –

The IUCN on Saturday also officially launched its “green status” — the first global standard for assessing species recovery and measuring conservation impacts. 

“It makes the invisible work of conservation visible,” Molly Grace, a professor at the University of Oxford and Green Status co-chair, told a press conference on Saturday.

Efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have largely failed.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.

The IUCN Congress is widely seen as a testing ground for a UN treaty — to be finalised at a summit in Kunming, China next May — to save nature.

“We would like to see that plan call for the halt to biodiversity loss by 2030,” said Smart.

A cornerstone of the new global deal could be setting aside 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans as protected areas, she added.

Nearly 30 percent of the 138,374 species assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List are at risk of extinction, the global conservation body reported Saturday.

Habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade have hammered global wildlife populations for decades, and climate change is now kicking in as a direct threat, the head of the IUCN’s Red List Unit told AFP in an interview.

Q. Are we in or on the cusp of the sixth mass extinction?

If we look at extinctions every 100 years since 1500, there is a marked inflection starting in the 1900s. The trend is showing that we are 100 to 1,000 times higher than the ‘background’, or normal, extinction rates. I would certainly say that the red list status shows that we’re on the cusp of the sixth extinction event [in the last 500 million years].  

If the trends carry on going upward at that rate, we’ll be facing a major crisis soon.

Q: The Red List began in 1964. Has it changed much?

A: The initial list wasn’t really based on scientific criteria. It was more of a gut feel: ‘We think the species is under some degree of threat’.  But as the list started to grow, we realised that we needed to make the list scientifically defensible. So we took a big step back and asked: ‘What is it we are trying to measure?’ 

The answer was quite simple: risk of extinction.

Q: Are there species that would have gone extinct without the Red List?

A: There are lots of species around the world that we would almost certainly have lost. The Red List process drew attention, for example, to the plight of the Arabian oryx and led to conservation efforts — taking the animals out of the wild, captive breeding, reintroductions. We’ve seen species very nearly extinct that are thriving now.

Q: Does the Red List make recommendations?

A: The Red List is not policy prescriptive, it’s really just a statement of fact –- this is what the status of the species is. Then it’s up to the decision makers to interpret that and decide what policies should be enacted.

Q: Do you ever come under pressure over the listings?

A: There is lots of lobbying. Surprisingly, it’s not so much about the up-listing to a higher threat level. For some high-profile charismatic species, if you want to down-list them because there has been successful conservation actions, we often get lobbied very, very hard to not do that. 

There’s real concern that if a species goes down a category, that conservation investment will stop. This is where the ‘green status’ will really help.

Q. What is the green status?

A:  After you’ve done the Red List assessment, what are you going to do about it? This is where we started talking about the green status. How do you measure whether your conservation actions are being successful? If we hadn’t done anything, where would it be now? If we stopped all conservation efforts now, what will happen to that species going forward? Those are the metrics in the green status process.

Q: Couldn’t that lead to species conservation triage?

A:  There’s a limited amount of funding available and vast number of species. It does come down to some really harsh realities. You’re obligated to just let some species go extinct because we really can’t save them. 

But it’s not something we tackle head on in the Red List process. We effectively pass the buck on to others to make those very hard decisions.

Q: Climate change is rarely cited as a driver of extinction. Why is that?

A: It is obvious for the polar bears because of the direct link between sea ice cover and global warming, but with other megafauna it’s a lot harder to detect the impacts of climate change. 

There is evidence pointing to climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. But when experts record threats to a species they may put ‘increased fire frequency’, not climate change.  

The chytrid fungus is wiping out amphibians all around the world, and we are pretty sure that its emergence is very much linked to climate change. But with the evidence we have now, the category of threat is invasive species, not climate change.  

Trapped on island habitats made smaller by rising seas, Indonesia’s Komodo dragons were listed as “endangered” on Saturday, in an update of the wildlife Red List that also warned overfishing threatens nearly two-in-five sharks with extinction. 

About 28 percent of the 138,000 species assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for its survival watchlist are now at risk of vanishing in the wild forever, as the destructive impact of human activity on the natural world deepens.

But the latest update of the Red List for Threatened Species also highlights the potential for restoration, with four commercially fished tuna species pulling back from a slide towards extinction after a decade of efforts to curb overexploitation. 

The most spectacular recovery was seen in the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which leapt from “endangered” across three categories to the safe zone of “least concern”. 

The species — a mainstay of high-end sushi in Japan — was last assessed in 2011. 

“These Red List assessments demonstrate just how closely our lives and livelihoods are intertwined with biodiversity,” IUCN Director General Bruno Oberle said in a statement.

– ‘Clarion call’ –

A key message from the IUCN Congress, taking place in the French city of Marseille, is that disappearing species and the destruction of ecosystems are no less existential threats than global warming.

At the same time, climate change itself is casting a darker shadow than ever before on the futures of many species, particularly endemic animals and plants that live uniquely on small islands or in certain biodiversity hotspots. 

Komodo dragons — the world’s largest living lizards — are found only in the World Heritage-listed Komodo National Park and neighbouring Flores. 

The species “is increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change” said the IUCN: rising sea levels are expected to shrink its tiny habitat at least 30 percent over the next 45 years. 

Outside of protected areas, the fearsome  throwbacks are also rapidly losing ground as humanity’s footprint expands. 

“The idea that these prehistoric animals have moved one step closer to extinction due in part to climate change is terrifying,” said Andrew Terry, Conservation Director at the Zoological Society of London. 

Their decline is a “clarion call for nature to be placed at the heart of all decision making” at crunch UN climate talks in Glasgow, he added.

– ‘An alarming rate’ –

The most comprehensive survey of sharks and rays ever undertaken, meanwhile, revealed that 37 percent of 1,200 species evaluated are now classified as directly threatened with extinction, falling into one of three categories: “vulnerable,” “endangered,” or “critically endangered”. 

That’s a third more species at risk than only seven years ago, said Simon Fraser University Professor Nicholas Dulvy, lead author of a study published on Monday underpinning the Red List assessment.

“The conservation status of the group as a whole continues to deteriorate, and overall risk of extinction is rising at an alarming rate,” he told AFP.

Five species of sawfish — whose serated snouts get tangled in cast off fishing gear — and the iconic shortfin mako shark are among those most threatened.

Chondrichthyan fish, a group made up mainly of sharks and rays, “are important to ecosystems, economies and cultures,” Sonja Fordham, president of Shark Advocates International and co-author of the upcoming study, told AFP.

“By not sufficiently limiting catch, we’re jeopardising ocean health and squandering opportunities for sustainable fishing, tourism, traditions and food security in the long term.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization reports some 800,000 tonnes of sharks caught — intentionally or opportunistically — each year, but research suggests the true figure is two to four times greater.

– Conservation tracker –

The IUCN on Saturday also officially launched its “green status” — the first global standard for assessing species recovery and measuring conservation impacts. 

“It makes the invisible work of conservation visible,” Molly Grace, a professor at the University of Oxford and Green Status co-chair, said at a press conference on Saturday.

The new yardstick measures the extent to which species are depleted or recovered compared to their historical population levels, and assesses the effectiveness of past and potential future conservation actions. 

Efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have largely failed.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.

“The red list status shows that we’re on the cusp of the sixth extinction event,” the IUCN’s Head of Red List Unit Craig Hilton-Taylor told AFP.  

“If the trends carry on going upward at that rate, we’ll be facing a major crisis soon.”

The world will get an update Saturday of the Red List of Threatened Species, the authoritative catalogue of how many of the planet’s animal and plant species are teetering on the brink of extinction due to human activity.

Experts for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is holding a world congress in the French city of Marseille, have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century, and almost 28 percent are currently at risk of vanishing forever.

Habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade have hammered global wildlife populations, but scientists say they are increasingly worried about the looming threats of climate change.

AFP spoke with Craig Hilton-Taylor, the IUCN’s Head of Red List Unit on the eve of the congress.

Q. Are we in or on the cusp of the sixth mass extinction?

If we look at extinctions every 100 years since 1500, there is a marked inflection starting in the 1900s. The trend is showing that we are 100 to 1,000 times higher than the ‘background’, or normal, extinction rates. I would certainly say that the red list status shows that we’re on the cusp of the sixth extinction event [in the last 500 million years].  

If the trends carry on going upward at that rate, we’ll be facing a major crisis soon.

Q: The Red List began in 1964. Has it changed much?

A: The initial list wasn’t really based on scientific criteria. It was more of a gut feel: ‘We think the species is under some degree of threat’.  But as the list started to grow, we realised that we needed to make the list scientifically defensible. So we took a big step back and asked: ‘What is it we are trying to measure?’ 

The answer was quite simple: risk of extinction.

Q: Are there species that would have gone extinct without the Red List?

A: There are lots of species around the world that we would almost certainly have lost. The Red List process drew attention, for example, to the plight of the Arabian oryx and led to conservation efforts — taking the animals out of the wild, captive breeding, reintroductions. We’ve seen species very nearly extinct that are thriving now.

Q: Does the Red List make recommendations?

A: The Red List is not policy prescriptive, it’s really just a statement of fact –- this is what the status of the species is. Then it’s up to the decision makers to interpret that and decide what policies should be enacted.

Q: Do you ever come under pressure over the listings?

A: There is lots of lobbying. Surprisingly, it’s not so much about the up-listing to a higher threat level. For some high-profile charismatic species, if you want to down-list them because there has been successful conservation actions, we often get lobbied very, very hard to not do that. 

There’s real concern that if a species goes down a category, that conservation investment will stop. This is where the ‘green status’ will really help.

Q. What is the green status?

A:  After you’ve done the Red List assessment, what are you going to do about it? This is where we started talking about the green status. How do you measure whether your conservation actions are being successful? If we hadn’t done anything, where would it be now? If we stopped all conservation efforts now, what will happen to that species going forward? Those are the metrics in the green status process.

Q: Couldn’t that lead to species conservation triage?

A:  There’s a limited amount of funding available and vast number of species. It does come down to some really harsh realities. You’re obligated to just let some species go extinct because we really can’t save them. 

But it’s not something we tackle head on in the Red List process. We effectively pass the buck on to others to make those very hard decisions.

Q: Climate change is rarely cited as a driver of extinction. Why is that?

A: It is obvious for the polar bears because of the direct link between sea ice cover and global warming, but with other megafauna it’s a lot harder to detect the impacts of climate change. 

There is evidence pointing to climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. But when experts record threats to a species they may put ‘increased fire frequency’, not climate change.  

The chytrid fungus is wiping out amphibians all around the world, and we are pretty sure that its emergence is very much linked to climate change. But with the evidence we have now, the category of threat is invasive species, not climate change.  

Climate change and creaky infrastructure were blamed Friday for the scale of the impact from floods tearing through New York City when remnants of Hurricane Ida swept across the US northeast, killing at least 47 people.

“We are in a whole different world,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the flash floods. “This is a different challenge.”

Record rain turned streets into rivers and shut down subway services as water cascaded onto tracks. Nearly a dozen people drowned in basement apartments.

The extreme weather, combined with a lack of preparation, stretched the United States’ biggest city to breaking point. 

“It’s no big surprise that the city seems to break down every time there’s a big storm,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the think-tank Center for an Urban Future.

“The city’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the population growth that New York’s had in the last couple of decades, let alone the increasing ferocity of storms, and rising sea levels that have come with climate change,” Bowles said.

While there has been a lot of investment in big projects — train stations, airports, new bridges — less funding has gone to “unsexy” projects such as sewer lines and water mains, he said.

Nicole Gelinas, an urban economics expert at the Manhattan Institute, another think-tank, said New York’s infrastructure “was not built for seven inches of rainfall in a few hours.”

Drains for the city’s sewer system get clogged, Gelinas said, and “there’s not enough green space to catch some of the water before it runs into the drains.

“So some of these avenues, they become canals when there’s a big storm.”

New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were the hardest hit by Ida, which ravaged the southern state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast earlier in the week before sweeping northeast.

President Joe Biden, who has made threats from climate change a priority, flew to Louisiana, where more than 800,000 people remained without power after Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm.

He said costly improvements to the levee system around New Orleans after the far deadlier Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had proved their worth in preventing more catastrophic damage this time.

Similarly transformative infrastructure projects — rather than simply rebuilding — will have to become the new norm, he said, pushing for passage of his giant $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill in Congress.

“Things have changed so drastically in terms of the environment, you’ve already crossed a certain threshold,” he said.

“You can’t build back a road, a highway or a bridge to what it was before.”

– Like a ‘jungle’ –

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Storm Ida had left 25 people dead in his state, most of them “individuals who got caught in their vehicles.”

Thirteen deaths were reported in New York City, including 11 victims who could not escape their basements, police said.

Three people were killed in the New York suburb of Westchester, while another five died in Pennsylvania and one — a state trooper — in Connecticut, officials said.

“I’m 50 years old and I’ve never seen that much rain ever,” said Metodija Mihajlov, whose Manhattan restaurant basement was flooded with three inches of water.

“It was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is so strange this year,” Mihajlov told AFP.

The National Weather Service recorded 3.15 inches of rain in New York’s Central Park in just an hour — beating a record set just last month during Storm Henri.

The US Open tennis tournament was halted as howling wind and rain blew under the corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.

It is rare for such storms to strike America’s northeastern seaboard and comes as the surface layer of oceans warms due to climate change.

The warming is causing cyclones to become more powerful and carry more water, posing an increasing threat to the world’s coastal communities, scientists say.

“Global warming is upon us and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it,” said New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

US pediatric Covid hospitalizations have surged since Delta became predominant, but a new study that offers a first look at the relevant data suggests that fears the variant causes more severe disease are unfounded.

The paper by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that between June 20 and July 31, 2021, unvaccinated adolescents were more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated.

The health agency analyzed hospital records from across an area covering around 10 percent of the US population, between March 1, 2020 and August 14, 2021.

This covered the period before the emergence of Delta, the most contagious strain to date, and after it became dominant, from June 20 onwards.

Weekly hospitalizations of children aged 0-17 were at their lowest between June 12 and July 3, at 0.3 per 100,000, before rising to 1.4 per 100,000 in the week ending August 14 — a 4.7-fold increase.

Pediatric hospitalizations reached their all-time peak of 1.5 per 100,000 in the week leading up to January 9, when the US experienced its winter wave that was driven by the Alpha variant. 

Consistent with prior research, children aged 12-17 and 0-4 are at higher risk of Covid hospitalization than those aged 5-11.

After examining 3,116 hospital records from the period before Delta, and comparing them to 164 records during the Delta period, the percentage of children with severe indicators was found to not differ greatly.

Specifically, the percent of hospitalized patients admitted to intensive care was 26.5 pre-Delta and 23.2 post; the percent placed on ventilators was 6.1 pre-Delta and 9.8 post; and the percent who died was 0.7 pre-Delta and 1.8 post.

These differences did not rise to the level of statistical significance.

The finding comes with the important caveat that because the number of hospitalizations in the post-Delta period is small, more data will need to accrue for scientists to gain greater confidence about the conclusion.

The study also underscored vaccine effectiveness against pediatric Covid hospitalization during Delta.

Between June 20 and July 31, among 68 adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19 whose vaccination status was known, 59 were unvaccinated, five were partly vaccinated, and four were fully vaccinated.

This meant the unvaccinated were 10.1 times more likely to be hospitalized compared to vaccinated.

– Children shielded by community vaccinations – 

A second study by the CDC examined childhood Covid cases, hospitalizations, and emergency department visits from June to August 2021, and compared them to the levels of community vaccination at the time.

Covid-related pediatric (ages 0-17) emergency department visits and hospitalizations were 3.4 times higher and 3.7 times higher respectively in states that fell in the bottom quartile of overall vaccinated per capita, compared to states in the highest quartile.

The takeaway message is that, while clinical trials for vaccines among those under the age of 12 and subsequent authorizations are awaited, high community rates of vaccination squelch Covid transmission and protect children.

US pediatric Covid hospitalizations have surged since Delta became predominant, but a new study that offers a first look at the relevant data suggests that fears the variant causes more severe disease are unfounded.

The paper by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that between June 20 and July 31, 2021, unvaccinated adolescents were more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated.

The health agency analyzed hospital records from across an area covering around 10 percent of the US population, between March 1, 2020 and August 14, 2021.

This covered the period before the emergence of Delta, the most contagious strain to date, and after it became dominant, from June 20 onwards.

Weekly hospitalizations of children aged 0-17 were at their lowest between June 12 and July 3, at 0.3 per 100,000, before rising to 1.4 per 100,000 in the week ending August 14 — a 4.7-fold increase.

Pediatric hospitalizations reached their all-time peak of 1.5 per 100,000 in the week leading up to January 9, when the US experienced its winter wave that was driven by the Alpha variant. 

After examining 3,116 hospital records from the period before Delta, and comparing them to 164 records during the Delta period, the percentage of children with severe indicators was found to not differ greatly.

Specifically, the percent of patients admitted to intensive care was 26.5 pre-Delta and 23.2 post; the percent placed on ventilators was 6.1 pre-Delta and 9.8 post; and the percent who died was 0.7 pre-Delta and 1.8 post.

These differences did not rise to the level of statistical significance.

The finding comes with the important caveat that because the number of hospitalizations in the post-Delta period is small, more data will need to accrue for scientists to gain greater confidence about the conclusion.

The study also underscored vaccine effectiveness against pediatric Covid hospitalization during Delta.

Between June 20 and July 31, among 68 adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19 whose vaccination status was known, 59 were unvaccinated, five were partly vaccinated, and four were fully vaccinated.

This meant the unvaccinated were 10.1 times more likely to be hospitalized compared to vaccinated.

The world’s leading global conservation congress opened on Friday, with warnings that humanity must tackle the grave risks of biodiversity loss and climate change together.

The key message from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is that disappearing species and the destruction of ecosystems are no less existential threats than global warming. 

“The battle for the climate — against climate change — is twinned with the battle to preserve and restore biodiversity,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a speech at the opening ceremony in the French port city of Marseille. 

But efforts to stem the losses of the world’s wildlife had fallen behind, he warned. 

How to reverse relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion during the conference. 

“We are facing huge challenges. We are seeing the climate changing and impacting hugely our societies,” said IUCN chief Bruno Oberle in a speech before the congress opened. 

“We are seeing biodiversity disappearing and the pandemic hitting our economies, our families, our health.” 

The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial UN summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future. 

Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species. 

But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the spectre that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.

Protesters in Marseille, with banners that read “Nature is not for sale!” and “Change the system not the climate!”, urged more urgent action.  

“It’s hard to read the headlines: floods, fires, famines, plagues and tell your children that everything is alright,” said actor Harrison Ford, who has become a vocal environmental campaigner, the opening ceremony.  

“It’s not alright. Dammit, it’s not alright!”

– ‘Our right to exist’ –

The nine-day IUCN meeting will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.

Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.

Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild. 

The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.

Oberle thanked indigenous groups for joining the IUCN’s membership and bringing a “wealth of experience” on how to have a different relationship with the planet.

Recent research has warned that rampant deforestation and climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a disastrous “tipping point” which would see tropical forests give way to savannah-like landscapes.

Rates of tree loss drop sharply in the forests where native peoples live, especially if they hold some degree of title — legal or customary — over land. 

“We are demanding from the world our right to exist as peoples, to live with dignity in our territories,” said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, lead coordinator for COICA, which represents indigenous groups in nine Amazon-basin nations.

Motions on the table include protecting 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combating wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.

Macron has said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.

The international community is trying to frame interim goals for this decade as well as longer-term aims for 2050.

The deaths of almost a dozen New Yorkers who could not escape their homes during flash flooding has exposed the perils of living in the city’s often-dangerous basements.

With rents in the Big Apple among the most expensive in the world, below-ground units offer an affordable option for many low-income residents.

But the cramped, sometimes windowless apartments can come with risks as Wednesday night’s record rainfall painfully highlighted.

Of the 13 people killed in New York City, 11 were found dead in basements, police said, as rapidly rising water levels left them with no way out.

The deaths highlight how the effects of climate change are disproportionately impacting the poor.

“Among the people MOST at risk during flash floods here are those living in off-the-books basement dwellings that don’t meet the safety codes necessary to save lives,” lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“These are working class, immigrant, and low-income people & families,” she added.

Although it is not yet known whether those who died lived in illegal basements, the tragedy has renewed attention about the issue.

The New York Times reported that an 86-year-old woman found dead at home in Queens lived in a building where there had been complaints about illegal basements.

Another victim was a 66-year-old man, originally from Ecuador, who died in a windowless bedroom in Brooklyn, the newspaper said.

A 2008 study by the Pratt Center for Community Development found that 114,000 New Yorkers lived in illegal basement apartments but researchers say the number is now likely to be much higher. 

“The problem is that because these spaces are illegal, because there are big fines associated with them, because the tenants need the space, the homeowners need the income, no one wants to talk about it,” said Rebekah Morris, who leads basement legalization work at Pratt, told AFP.

“So it’s very, very difficult to assess what the actual numbers are but we know anecdotally that it’s very high,” she added.

The problem is becoming more acute as New York’s population grows but adequate housing fails to keep up.

Over the past decade, the city added 629,000 people, bringing its population to more than 8.8 million, according to US census data released last month.

All but one death in this week’s storm occurred in the borough of Queens, which has a high immigrant population, including many undocumented workers from Central and South America.

– Evacuation plan –

Morris said basement units are “a key piece of the housing ecosystem” among immigrant communities, essential workers and older residents, who cannot afford to stay elsewhere.

“There’s such a big crisis here. We don’t have enough housing. And so people rent where they can’t get a roof over their head, which puts them in danger,” said Morris.

Experts want action taken against unscrupulous landlords who take advantage of low supply and cut corners to maximize profits. 

“There does have to be some accountability for the property owners who cut up apartments illegally,” Nicole Gelinas, urban economics expert at the Manhattan Institute think-tank, told AFP.

But activists also say that basement apartments are part of the solution to New York’s housing problems.

It’s not basement units per se that are problematic but illegal ones that don’t meet basic safety requirements such as suitable emergency exit routes, they say.

The Pratt Center is part of a coalition of groups trying to help increase the number of legally-recognized below-ground units under a campaign called BASE, which stands for Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone.

They estimate that there is the potential for the creation of 200,000 safe and affordable basement apartments to boost New York’s housing stock.

On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that extreme weather caused by climate change meant New York required a “new set of ground rules” for those living below ground.

“We need a plan to evacuate folks who live in basements when we have extreme rain and flooding, he told MSNBC, announcing he would set up a task force to study the issue.

The role of climate change in New York’s deadly flash floods and the city’s creaking infrastructure were under the spotlight Friday after torrential rains left at least 47 people dead across the US northeast.

“We are in a whole different world,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the remnants of Hurricane Ida drenched the biggest city in the United States. “This is a different challenge.”

Record rainfall turned streets into rivers, shut down subway services as water cascaded onto tracks, and drowned nearly a dozen people in their basement apartments.

“It’s no big surprise that the city seems to break down every time there’s a big storm,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the think-tank Center for an Urban Future.

“The city’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the population growth that New York’s had in the last couple of decades, let alone the increasing ferocity of storms, and rising sea levels that have come with climate change,” Bowles said.

While there has been lots of investment in big projects — train stations, airports, new bridges — less funding has gone to “unsexy” projects such as sewer lines and water mains, he said.

Nicole Gelinas, an urban economics expert at the Manhattan Institute, another think-tank, said New York’s infrastructure “was not built for seven inches of rainfall in a few hours.”

Drains for the city’s sewer system get clogged, Gelinas said, and “there’s not enough green space to catch some of the water before it runs into the drains.

“So some of these avenues, they become canals when there’s a big storm.”

New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were the hardest hit by Ida, which ravaged the southern state of Louisiana and Gulf Coast earlier in the week before delivering a blow to the northeast.

President Joe Biden, who has made threats from climate change a priority, on Friday headed to Louisiana, where more than 800,000 people remained without power after Ida made landfall as a Category Four storm.

– ‘Matter of life and death’ –

Biden was expected to use his trip to New Orleans to highlight the links between increasing episodes of extreme weather and the broader global climate crisis.

Speaking on Thursday, Biden said Hurricane Ida and uncontrollable wild fires in the western United States are “yet another reminder” of the crisis.

“It’s a matter of life and death and we need to meet it together,” he said in a speech at the White House.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Storm Ida had left 25 people dead in his state, most of them “individuals who got caught in their vehicles.”

Thirteen deaths were reported in New York City including 11 victims who could not escape their basements, police said.

Three people were killed in the New York suburb of Westchester, while another five died in Pennsylvania and one — a state trooper — in Connecticut, officials said.

“I’m 50 years old and I’ve never seen that much rain ever,” said Metodija Mihajlov whose Manhattan restaurant basement was flooded with three inches of water.

“It was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is so strange this year,” Mihajlov told AFP.

The National Weather Service recorded 3.15 inches of rain in New York’s Central Park in just an hour — beating a record set just last month during Storm Henri.

The US Open tennis tournament was halted as howling wind and rain blew under the corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.

It is rare for such storms to strike America’s northeastern seaboard and comes as the surface layer of oceans warms due to climate change.

The warming is causing cyclones to become more powerful and carry more water, posing an increasing threat to the world’s coastal communities, scientists say.

“Global warming is upon us and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it,” said New York Senator Chuck Schumer.