The future of wetlands: We’ve been warned!

At the Rio conference 25 years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists – which included 1,700 leading researchers, a number of them Nobel prizewinners – issued a warning to humanity about the dire consequences of failing to curtail environmental destruction.

Last year, world scientists issued a second warning, bemoaning the lack of progress since the first warning was issued and drawing attention to particular issues, such as the declining availability of fresh water and the likely impacts of climate change on biodiversity.

Times have changed, and this second take has benefitted from something that was “not a thing” in 1992: going viral. Over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed the 2017 warning, and another 5,000 or so have endorsed it since its publication in November. It’s inspired almost 9,000 tweets, and currently ranks sixth on the Altmetric scale for online attention to research, out of all papers published worldwide in the last six years. A related book and documentary film are in the works, and the Scientists’ Warning website allows anyone to endorse the movement.

read more: https://forestsnews.cifor.org/57861/the-future-of-wetlands-weve-been-warned?fnl=en

Posted by admin on Sep 25 2018. Filed under News at Now, News From Roots, Water & Wetland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry