IUCN

• LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA, July 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In an unprecedented collaborative endeavor, Slovenia's Ministry of Environment, Climate and Energy, in partnership with Global Footprint Network, announces a critical date for the planet: this year's Earth Overshoot Day lands on August 2nd .
• The date, calculated by Global Footprint Network each year using National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts , marks when humanity's demand for biological resources exceeds the Earth's capacity to regenerate them within that year.
• To spotlight this issue, the Ministry and Global Footprint Network are organizing a high-level event on August 1st, held in Ljubljana and online , to discuss the implications of overshoot.
• Entities that act now are not just safeguarding the environment but future-proofing their economy and the wellbeing of their residents," underlines Steven Tebbe, CEO of Global Footprint Network.

• RCU has identified these needs in collaboration with its strategic partner IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), and they will be working together to address these important conservation issues.
• Comprehensive Regeneration, a concept developed by RCU in its sustainable development of AlUla, employs a diverse set of principles and approaches built around the goal of revitalising not only the landscape, but how people and societies interact with their surroundings.
• RCU has been taking clear action under the banner of Comprehensive Regeneration.
• Link to the report can be found here: comprehensiveregeneration.pdf (rcu.gov.sa)

• While technology has revolutionized our capacity to track threats to biodiversity on land, our understanding of the status of marine biodiversity remains fragmented and biased toward economically high-valued species.
• Most fish species are not scientifically monitored, which is done by collecting and analyzing population data.
• The fast decline of shark and ray species globally is representative of many other exploited marine species that lack scientific monitoring and a general political will for fisheries management.

Coastal sharks and rays missing in some areas, thrive in others

• In 2019, our team of experts carried out IUCN Red List assessments in the Bahamas to determine the global extinction risk status of several sharks and rays.
• We found that populations of the same species had collapsed in the southwest Atlantic due to unrestrained fishing.
• Across the whole region, we saw that although fishing pressure increased extinction risk, the strength of management engagement was widely overlooked, despite it reducing the extinction risk of all 26 wide-ranging sharks and rays.
• It is very rarely found in Colombia and has collapsed in Brazil where there are very few recent records.

A road map for shark recovery

• The U.S. Fishery Management Plan for Sharks of the Atlantic Ocean was implemented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1993.
• This plan was developed in response to the intense expansion of commercial and recreational fisheries in the 1970s to 1980s due to the increased global demand for shark meat, fins and cartilage as well as the concerns about their effects on shark populations.
• We found that populations in the northwest Atlantic recovered shortly after the implementation of this management plan.

Recovering species population through collaboration

• Concerted efforts can bridge the spots of successful management and recovery with adjacent nations where the species are still in decline, leading to success at a global scale.
• This approach will ensure that successful conservation in one country is not undone by less regulated fishing areas outside those borders.

• "With the support of the Tech4Nature initiative, Huawei, and its partners, we look forward to continued action to restore ocean and coastal biodiversity for future generations."
• The second phase of the project will use AI-based data analysis to guide the conservation decisions, support the research of marine biologists, and educate the public on the importance of reef conservation and restoration.
• It is hoped that this project can be replicated in other areas of Mauritius and balance the needs of tourism and conservation.
• And with up to 50% of the world's coral reef already destroyed or degraded, the project's success to date demonstrates the value of further large-scale global reef restoration supported by digital technology.