 So, welcome to this session on Defending Nature's Last Frontiers. My name is Nicole Schwab. I'm with the Campaign for Nature at National Geographic Society, and I'm delighted to be introducing this session, and we'll be hearing from Enric Salin, who is an explorer in residence at National Geographic. Enric is a scientist who had been doing a lot of work on marine science and one day found himself riding the obituary for the oceans. And he decided that he was going to leave academia and dedicate his life to conservation. Over the past 10 years, under Enric's leadership, the Pristine Seas Project has created 21 marine protected areas, covering an area half the size of Canada. And today, this is scaling up. We are at a time where we have to accelerate our efforts to protect the Earth's last remaining wild places, to protect the ecosystems that we all depend on. And so I'm delighted to invite Enric to tell us more about Defending Nature's Last Frontiers. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you. It's good to be back in the country that's home to the mighty Yellow and Yangtze rivers. But as our hosts know well, the Yangtze was a little too mighty 20 years ago. In the summer of 1998, it rained heavily. For over six weeks, water poured over the banks of the Yangtze, destroying everything on its path. It was one of the worst floods in modern Chinese history. By the time it was over, many homes were lost, many lives were lost. Authorities set out to understand what was the cost of such destruction, because many people remembered worse storms that caused less damage. And it didn't take them long to figure out what happened. In the years leading up to the flood, prosperity had come to the country, causing development that disrupted the balance between people and nature. To meet the needs of a growing nation, upstream forests had been cut down, and grasslands had been overgraced, which destroyed the ability of these ecosystems to absorb the excess water. At the same time, to meet the increasing demand for housing, people had been building homes and communities over wetlands, which are a great natural buffer against storm surges. Because in large part of the loss of these ecosystems, the Yangtze 1998 floods cost $20 billion in damages, and more than 3,000 lives were lost. One of the things I love about Chinese culture is that its major spiritual traditions, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, reveal balance. They all teach the importance of living in harmony with nature and all living things. And that teaching is more important now than ever before, because the devastation, the loss of ecosystems that we saw in 1998 in the Yangtze are happening at a global scale. That means that we are risking similar types of devastation. And we can boil it down to one thing. Our planet is becoming less wild. We are totally out of balance with nature. And unless we get our balance back, human society, as we know it, is going to be short-lived. Let me give you an example of this imbalance. Today, 96% of the mass of mammals is us and our domesticated livestock. Only 4% is everything else, from elephants, to tigers, to panda bears. 70% of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. And in the oceans, 90% of the large fish have been extracted by fishing in the last century alone. Yet only 7% of the ocean surface has been designated or proposed as protected areas. And only 2% of the surface of the ocean is fully protected from fishing or other activities. We are doing a little better on the land, yet only 15% of the land is in protected areas like national parks or nature reserves. That means that ecosystems around the world are under serious threat. Now let me give you one example. The Amazon. The Amazon forest is one of the richest and most productive regions on the planet. It is so rich and diverse that you can find more species in a single Brazil nut tree than in an entire hectare of European soil. And one of the reasons for this richness is that it gets such heavy rain. And here is an interesting thing about this rain. The forest creates a rain. Trees absorb water from the ground and in the tropical heat release it as water vapor through the leaves. That water vapor will rise, eventually condense and fall as rain, which lowers air pressure, drawing in more moisture from the Atlantic Ocean, which will fall as rain and it will get into the ground and the forest will absorb it and so on and so forth. But now we are destroying the Amazon forest at the highest rate in recent decades. The equivalent of two football fields per minute. One study suggests that if we cut down more than 20 percent of the current Amazon forest, that cycle will break. The forest will not be able to produce enough rain and it will turn into a savannah. And that will affect the entire planet. There is a moral argument, clear moral argument against this type of devastation. But let's stick for now with the economic argument. The systems and the species that live in them are our life support system. It is these other species that produce the oxygen that we breathe. They pollinate our crops. They filter the clean water that we drink. They protect us from devastating floods. And wild places are the single best hope against climate catastrophe. We are spending resources in developing miraculous technologies that are going to suck our carbon pollution from the atmosphere. But we already have these technologies. Our forests, grasslands, wetlands and ocean habitats absorb half of the excess CO2 that we expel into the atmosphere every year. Of intact wild places, it will be impossible to achieve the Paris climate goals. Yet we are systematically destroying these ecosystems. The environment, our natural capital, every year provides $72 trillion in free support to the global economy. To put that into context, imagine that we combine the GDPs of China, the United States and Japan. Now double the number. That's how much value we get from the environment every year. But our overuse of natural resources are costing us $6 trillion per year and the number could go up to $30 trillion by 2050. A world above two degrees Celsius is not insurable. The CEO of one of the big insurance companies said that. That world without wild places is not even investable. The good news is that protecting ecosystems can provide greater value than destroying them. We just need to give ecosystems the space they need to recover from our abuse and continue providing for us. And I know because I have seen it. Now let me give you an example. In 1999, this little place called Cabo Pulmo in Mexico was an underwater desert. The fishermen were so upset with not having enough fish to catch that they did something that nobody expected. Instead of going out and trying to catch the few fish left, they decided to stop fishing completely. They created a national park in the sea, a no-take marine reserve. We went back 10 years later, and this is what we saw. We saw it go from degraded to pristine in just 10 years, including the return of the large predators like the groupers, sharks, and jacks. And you know who else is driving? Those visionary fishermen who are now making more money from tourism inside the reserve and better fishing around it. And I've seen similar examples around the world. On average, the biomass of fish is six times larger inside reserves than outside. And the economic benefits from tourism can be enormous. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park brings in $5 billion to the Australian economy every year. That's 35 times more than fishing and many more jobs. And in the United States, every dollar invested by the US government on our national parks produces $10 in economic revenue to the local economy. The problem is that we don't have enough protected areas. So how much of the planet we need to protect? Studies suggest that if we want to avoid the extinction of one million species and all the benefits they provide, if we want to avoid the collapse of our life-support system, if we want a world not exceeding two degrees Celsius, we need to go renewable in terms of energy, but also we need to use half of the planet in a more responsible way and keep the other half in natural state. And to achieve that, we need to commit together to protect 30% of our planet by 2030. The People's Republic of China has embarked on an ecological redlining exercise and committed to protect a quarter of its lands and 30% of its coastal waters. That's an area larger than Greenland. These are ambitious targets, but some will say it's impossible. Why? Because we need more land and we need to fish more to feed 10 billion people. But we already produce enough food for 10 billion people. We just waste a third of it from the field to the table. And we make other senseless decisions along the way. If we just became a little smarter about the way we eat and produce our food, we could have both a healthy planet and a healthy food supply. But some will say, oh, it's impossible. It's going to cost too much. We cannot afford it. Well, you know how much money governments spend to subsidize mostly destructive practices around the world every year? $35 billion. Studies show that protecting 30% of the planet would cost on the order of tens of billions of dollars. And guess what is the price of subsidies for fossil fuels? Every year, governments subsidize the fossil fuel companies directly, pre-taxed with $300 billion. Plus, we need to add $5 trillion with which society subsidizes the cost of burning fossil fuels every year. That's numbers from the International Monetary Fund. The money is there. We just use it to fund the activities that destroy our natural capital, that destroy our life support system. But you know the really good news? That protection generates more value than destruction. New York decided that instead of spending $10 billion, building a wastewater treatment plan to produce clean tap water for the city, the city decided to spend only $2 billion protecting the natural water supply, the cut skills, the mountains, and forest north of the city. And now, New York has the reputation of having the cleanest and most drinkable tap water in any large city in the United States. That's the same value realized by the Chinese government after the 1998 floods. Realizing that future rains could create similar types of devastation, local authorities brought in environmental scientists to help restore the ecosystems along the Yangtze to provide that natural protection from floods. It would have been more cost effective to keep those ecosystems in place. But I hope we can learn from these lessons. I was in Beijing a month ago meeting with leaders from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who are looking at ways to reconcile economic development and ecosystem protection. And I am optimistic and hopeful that China will be able to achieve those ambitious targets for protection and that vision of ecological civilization as a day-to-day reality and not just as an ideal. And China is not alone. We just conducted a survey on 12 countries of the five different continents. And people around the world believe that we have already protected 30% of the planet. And they overwhelmingly agree that we need to protect half of the planet. Next year, we have a historic opportunity. China is hosting a historic conference of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in the city of Kunming in October 2020. That's the place and the time where the world can come together and agree to protect at least 30% of our planet, land and seas by 2030 as a milestone. But not only governments have something to do here. Everybody can help. The World Economic Forum is launching an initiative called Business for Nature this week. And I hope that all of your companies will join and commit to it. They will advocate for the shift that I mentioned. And I know that you are not used to hear good news from scientists. But this is what I can tell you today. If we rise to the occasion, scientists will not have to ride the obituary of our planet. And our kids will not look back at us, angry and disappointed. Instead, we will tell stories like Cabo Pumos, stories of resurgence, stories of renewal, stories of people coming together to save the planet we love. I look forward to taking that journey with you. Thank you. Thank you, Enric. So clearly, we have a threat. We have a threat from continued destruction of ecosystems. But as you've laid out very clearly, we have an opportunity. The opportunity presented by protection protected areas. And we have a plan protecting 30% of the planet. In your opinion, what is the major roadblock? What is the main challenge on our way to actually implementing this plan of protecting 30% of the planet? Well, there are 1,000 roadblocks. I would say the main challenge is corporations don't pay for polluting. They pollute for free. And they destroy our natural capital. They destroy our life support system for free. And it is citizens who pay the cost with their well-being or their lives, as we saw in the case of the young set. So for me, one thing we need to do is to internalize the costs of our activities. It's through a carbon tax or through other types of environmental taxes where companies will have to pay for the cost that citizens would have to incur otherwise. And that means also that governments would have to think about the avoided costs. Protecting those forests and those wetlands and those grasslands along the Yangtze would have been more cost effective, less costly in terms of human lives and financial resources if they had been protected versus developed and then tried to repair something that we don't have the ability to rebuild. And all these services that nature provides for free, we cannot make them ourselves. One example is the oxygen we breathe. The oxygen we breathe is produced by bacteria in the ocean and by plants. And we did the calculation. If we had the industrial ability to produce the oxygen that is in the atmosphere now that nature produced for free, it would cost 1,600 times the global GDP. And that's just one service. So that's a big challenge that we have. Thank you. And I'd like to take questions from the audience. Yes? Ivan. Enric, thank you for taking us through the story of water. I was wondering if you could give us a few insights on the story of sand. Desertification has been, I think, accelerating in a lot of places in the world. I read that in the Middle East, they discovered a miracle bush that is able to push back desertification and create its own environment. But can you give us any sort of pointers, any hope, any interesting factoids on the desertification of the land? Any important points about the desertification of the planet? Of course, I'm not expert on deserts or the certification. But I have been to a protected area in the border of Saudi and Abu Dhabi, where the overgracing of the natural plants has been reduced because camels have been domesticated and camels, which are kind of the desert equivalent of the cows, have been taken out of the area. And the area has been re-wilded with the natural herbivores, the oryx and the gazelles of the desert. And the plants are coming back because the grazing by the natural herbivores are enhancing the growth of these plants. This is one reason why, before humans get to a place, you have these ecosystems with thousands of species and everybody co-exists. It seems that we are the only species that cannot co-exist with the rest of the planet. So these re-wilding efforts are very, very important for stopping the certification and other erosion of mounds, for example. And the re-wilding involves both replanting vegetation but also restoring the natural processes through the reintroduction of herbivores that were abandoned at one point and had been eliminated. So there are great opportunities for bringing about entire ecosystems. And we have great examples from a British farm that went from a monoculture with the soil poisoned by pesticides and fungicides. And now it's a place that cells are going to meet and people go there for safaris to see all the animals that they cannot see anywhere in the United Kingdom. Two examples in the mountains in Romania where bison are back or the walls in Yellowstone were in 1995, walls were introduced in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, and they brought back the entire ecosystem. Thanks, Eric. So you mentioned one of the biggest obstacles that you're facing is the big corporate pollute for free. But I was wondering, I think the solution for that will probably start from being able to see how much they actually pollute. But is there any central efforts or initiative or organization that tries to measure the data of who pollutes how much? Is there any kind of data sources that we can refer to that we can go back and see? Yeah, actually there is a great example in China. There is an individual called Ma Jun. He's one of the four most environmentalists in China. And he has developed this public database that you can access with your phone. And you can see the pollution by individual industries, individual plants. And that's a way to increase transparency. So Ma Jun, checking online, he's developed this amazing public database to look at pollution in China. Good evening. I'm Vanshika. I'm a global shaper from the New Delhi hub, India. So I had a few questions. Firstly, your views on what do you think of how far we've gone in terms of our negotiations with regard to climate change? So we have the new Paris climate deal, but where we're shifting from the common but differentiated responsibility CBDR approach to and what had mandatory targets to now like a voluntary approach. So instead of binding commitments, countries have to have like internally determined targets which are voluntary nature, which has some positives but also has a lot of pitfalls. So how do you think post 2020 that's going to play out? And link to that is also like climate finance, because there's so much money which is going into the sector and you'll be at the Green Climate Fund or so on. But in terms of execution or seeing the implementation of that, and especially, I mean, so the funding coming from North but like in the South countries, first is first getting that funding. And second is to have the skills and the manpower to kind of execute it. So that's another problem. So your views on that. And secondly, because if your focus was on water, we see with coral reefs in particular which are sort of the first to be hit by climate change. We see that, you know, be it El Nino or other other phenomena, there's been huge coral bleaching in the past 15, 20 years. And some people say that by 2030, 2040, we lose most of our corals. Do you think that what is that really what's going to happen or their ways to kind of? OK, yes. So coral, we are going, you know, the Paris Climate Agreement, the goal is not to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, right? We are already at one degree. So 1.5 degrees Celsius means the loss of 90% of the coral reefs of the world. Our climate optimum means that we are willing to lose all most of the coral reefs. In terms of the finance there, there is a lot of climate finance programs like Red Plus to enhance, foster reforestation and stop deforestation, pay performance schemes. But they haven't really worked. And people have been caching the money. And actually continue to deforestation. And Brazil is a good example. And the first, what was the first question? Oh, yeah, the countries. The countries, yes. So, you know, for climate we have this target, 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius. Everybody understood that. We cannot exceed that temperature. And that means that we have to reduce emissions. Everything else is just tactics, right? And no country came to Paris with a plan to operationalize that target. None, right? Biodiversity is much more difficult because you have 9 million species on the planet. And you have 800 different ecoregions. And it's so complicated. There are so many, so many levels. And then you have genetic resources. And until now, the biodiversity targets were so difficult that it was impossible to achieve any progress. The only target that so far has succeeded is the quantitative special targets. Until now, next year, October 2020, the goal is to achieve 10% of the ocean under protection and 17% of the land. We are on our way. And we are pushing for having 30% protected by 2030 as one of the apex targets for the convention for biodiversity, similar to the 2 degrees Celsius, right? Most countries are not going to have a plan, right? Some countries are going to take longer than others. But this will require work at the national level but also international coordination because the convention doesn't say that we need to protect 10% of every country. It's 10% of the global common, right? For example, if we care about climate change, Brazil is more important than Niger, right? The Amazon forest is more important than a desert. So it's going to be very difficult. But the first step is to agree on an apex target that everybody understands, that the politician can explain and support, and then we'll have 10 years to implement it. Oh, sorry. Wrap up in two minutes. Thanks, Eric, for sharing with us. So I'm a veggie owl from 2018. So my question is regarding, you know, you have shown that 96% of the planet is full of the mammals used for livestock and also humans. So for me, in order to maybe improve the diversity, maybe we need to cut down the demand, maybe ask more people to eat, more maybe vegetarian food. But to me, I'm okay, but how to communicate with the general public? What's the best strategy? Yeah, one of the big solutions for climate change and destruction of nature would be to eat less meat, and eat more plants. That would be also good for people's health. How to communicate this to people? Well, you know, it's very complicated. The problem is that we cannot place the burden on citizens only, right? Governments have a responsibility. Companies have a responsibility. So it's going to be very difficult to have a bottom-up action that is going to achieve the desired climate goals in time, right? So we need some regulation from governments to reduce the amount of land that is destined to grazing, for example, in the United States alone, for example, the United States, 41% of the land of the United States is dedicated to livestock, 41%. And it's not a significant proportion of the calories that the American citizens get, right? So we need both. Just let's not place all the burden on the citizens. Thank you, Enric. We're coming to the end of our time, so that was the last question. I think we've clearly made the case that this is a complex problem that touches upon all the different areas, whether it's food production, how we look at economic activity, how we take into account the ecosystem services of nature that are not valued at the moment, and that we really all need to step up our efforts because we cannot afford to lose the ecosystems. It's at our own risk, so thank you, and I hope we'll be able to count on your support to make the case to protect 30% of the planet by 2030. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.