The Prime Minister addressed the high-level session on Financing
for Biodiversity at the virtual One Planet Summit this afternoon,
convened by President Macron.
A transcript of his remarks is below. More information on the
Summit and on the UK’s new commitment to spend at least £3bn of
international climate finance on nature and biodiversity is
available
here.
PRIME MINISTER BORIS JOHNSON AT THE ONE PLANET SUMMIT
“Christine thank you very much, I want to thank you
and I want to thank Emmanuel for organising this One Planet
Summit, because I think it’s an absolutely crucial subject.
“After all, we’re making a lot of progress as humanity in finding
the technological solutions to tackle climate change and reduce
carbon. Clearly there’s a huge amount still to do but we’re
starting to see a way forward since the Paris Summit five years
ago which was I think a huge success, we can see that humanity
can do this.
“But the problem is that we are destroying species and habitat at
an absolutely unconscionable rate. I think we’ve lost about 500
species in the last century, of all the mammals in the world –
the biomass of mammals – I think I’m right in saying that 96% of
mammals on our planet are now human beings or oxen or pigs or the
livestock that human beings rely on. 70% of all the birds in the
world are chickens.
“In other words, there has been a total or near-total destruction
of wildlife. Only 4% of the mammals in the world are now wild
mammals, from whales to monkeys, to you name it.
“That in my view is a disaster. We’re seeing a parallel loss of
habitat, of forests and plant species of all kinds. So that’s why
the UK is pledged to protect 30% of our land surface, 30% of our
marine surface, to create marine protected areas – vast protected
areas – which is something by the way an objective that we share
very much with France, with Canada – we’re all engaged in this
same effort.”
“And of the £11.6 billion that we’ve consecrated to climate
finance initiatives, we’re putting £3 billion to protecting
nature, whether it’s marine life, or timber conservation or
sustainable food production.
“I think that as global leaders, we must go further and I’m very
pleased therefore that so many countries have signed up to the UN
Leaders Pledge for Nature so that we have really hard-edged
targets for the preservation of species and wildlife, but also
the re-wilding of our planet in the way that Sir David
Attenborough has suggested.
“And I would like to see a world in which we give real meaning to
those Aichi targets that were set so many years ago at Kyoto and
I hope that our Chinese colleagues will be pushing that agenda at
their Biodiversity Summit in Kunming. I know that we will be
working with colleagues under the auspices of the UN to do that
at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
“Obviously it’s right to focus on climate change, obviously it’s
right to cut CO2 emissions, but we won’t achieve a real balance
with our planet unless we protect nature as well. One final
thought, don’t forget that the coronavirus pandemic was the
product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural
world.
“Like the original plague which struck the Greeks I seem to
remember in book one of the Iliad, it is a zoonotic disease. It
originates from bats or pangolins, from the demented belief that
if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become
more potent or whatever it is people believe, it originates from
this collision between mankind and the natural world and we’ve
got to stop it.
“And that’s why I think that this summit is so important and this
focus on the natural world and on biodiversity is absolutely
critical. Yes we must tackle climate change, but climate change
must be seen as part of an overall agenda to protect the natural
world and I think the One Planet agenda is completely right.”
