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Nature positive and 30x30 – just soundbites or the foundations of a Cop15 deal?

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Thursday, December 1, 2022

As participants arrive in Montreal to negotiate this decade’s targets for protecting biodiversity, two themes are getting the lion’s share of attentionAfter more than two years of delays, Cop15, the once-in-decade global biodiversity summit, is about to begin. More than 10,000 participants from across the planet will start arriving in Montreal at the weekend to negotiate crucial goals for protecting biodiversity.There has been a coordinated push behind some targets, namely from a group of countries that want to protect 30% of land and sea for nature (30x30) by the end of the decade. The idea of “nature positive” is another theme being promoted in the pre-Cop15 rhetoric from NGOs and governments. Continue reading...

As participants arrive in Montreal to negotiate this decade’s targets for protecting biodiversity, two themes are getting the lion’s share of attentionAfter more than two years of delays, Cop15, the once-in-decade global biodiversity summit, is about to begin. More than 10,000 participants from across the planet will start arriving in Montreal at the weekend to negotiate crucial goals for protecting biodiversity.There has been a coordinated push behind some targets, namely from a group of countries that want to protect 30% of land and sea for nature (30x30) by the end of the decade. The idea of “nature positive” is another theme being promoted in the pre-Cop15 rhetoric from NGOs and governments. Continue reading...

As participants arrive in Montreal to negotiate this decade’s targets for protecting biodiversity, two themes are getting the lion’s share of attention

After more than two years of delays, Cop15, the once-in-decade global biodiversity summit, is about to begin. More than 10,000 participants from across the planet will start arriving in Montreal at the weekend to negotiate crucial goals for protecting biodiversity.

There has been a coordinated push behind some targets, namely from a group of countries that want to protect 30% of land and sea for nature (30x30) by the end of the decade. The idea of “nature positive” is another theme being promoted in the pre-Cop15 rhetoric from NGOs and governments.

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Confronting the Unbelievable

A photograph that dramatizes the power of nature

Photograph by Irina RozovskyWhen the photographer Irina Rozovsky moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia, she began taking walks around her new neighborhood. She’d push her daughter’s stroller to a nearby wooded path, trying to get the baby to sleep, and photograph what she could along the way. One day in 2018, after a storm, the path was flooded. A young girl stood in the bright sun at the edge of the murky water, observing the strange new scene before her—“confronting the unbelievable,” as Rozovsky puts it. The image reminded Rozovsky of the fairy-tale trope of a child getting lost in the forest. “It’s both a romance and a nightmare,” she told me.Rozovsky’s untitled photograph will be on display this fall at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as part of the exhibition “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845.” In an introduction to an accompanying book, the Atlantic contributing writer Imani Perry reflects on the 21st-century photographers who capture the region’s distinctive landscapes with compositions that evoke a 19th-century sense of the sublime. In the South, Perry writes, “nature takes over everything that humans create and destroy.”Rozovsky insists that the work is not making an environmental statement. As a mother, she worries about the role that humans have played in warming the world her daughter will inherit. But as a photographer, she told me, she was drawn to this particular scene for its “serene and surreal” beauty, its unsettling scale.A relative newcomer to the South, Rozovsky has been struck by the high drama of its nature. “It can be so wild,” she said, even just down the street in Athens. She’s not religious—but when trees fall, or a path floods like this, Rozovsky said, it can feel almost biblical. “There’s something larger than us.”This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Confronting the Unbelievable.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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