Go Green news
Go Green Supports WWF¢s Emergency Recovery Plan for Freshwater Biodiversity
Go Green turns 3 years old, with the same spirit and enthusiasm to resume its environmental activities with all the people who over the years have been with us. We had fun, raised awareness and learned to take care of the environment, to see that the simplest things are the most satisfactory.
As soon as the global situation allows us, GO Green will go out to sea to continue its small and humble mission. In the meantime, GO Green and Dressel Divers are actively involved in providing logistical and human support to Iberostar’s Wave of Change movement. Volunteering in all its forms and manifestations has to be the axis and the pillar of the success of environmental movements.
World’s Forgotten Fish Report
As you know, GO Green’s environment of action is the oceans, but today its motto “Detox the oceans detox your legacy” is focused on rivers, lakes and wetlands. GO Green wants to support The World’s Forgotten Fish Report, signed by 16 global conservation organizations.
The planet’s freshwater is home to more species per square kilometer than land or oceans, highlights an extraordinary variety of freshwater fish (18,075 species, 51 percent of all known species), despite the fact that rivers, lakes and wetlands only occupy 1 percent of the planet’s total surface area.
This report states that freshwater is losing biodiversity two to three times faster. Last year alone, 16 species became extinct.
“Nowhere is the world’s nature crisis more acute than in our rivers, lakes and wetlands, and the clearest indicator of the damage we are doing is the rapid decline in freshwater fish populations,” says Stuart Orr, WWF’s global freshwater leader.
But the study is also a call for help that Go Green wants to help give voice to: a third of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of extinction.
The data are devastating: migratory fish populations (11,000 species) have fallen by 76 percent in the last half century, and large fish by 94 percent. The importance of freshwater fish is reflected in some data collected in the report: they represent almost a quarter of all vertebrate species in the world, provide food for 200 million people and livelihoods for 60 million.
The report states that freshwater habitats are “critical indicators of the resilience of our life-support systems”. And that freshwater fish play a regulating role in their ecosystems and are “fundamental to natural balance.”
Emergency Recovery Plan for Freshwater Biodiversity
In May of this year the Conference of the Convention on Biological Diversity will be held and GO Green hopes that the concern for the oceans and forests will also be extended to these ecosystems that are so vital for the natural balance.
To stop a possible “catastrophic collapse”, the conservation organizations that Go Green supports, propose an emergency recovery plan for freshwater biodiversity, based on six pillars:
1.Let rivers flow more naturally.
- Improve water quality in freshwater ecosystems.
- Protect and restore critical habitats.
- End overfishing and unsustainable sand mining in rivers and lakes.
- Prevent and control invasions of exotic species.
- Protect free-flowing rivers and remove obsolete dams.
In 2021, at the conference of the Convention of Biological Diversity, governments have to seize the opportunity and agree on a new action framework, which pays just as much attention to protecting freshwater habitats as the world’s forests and oceans.
