The Americas Flyways Initiative (AFI) was formally introduced at The Local weather Week in New York as a cohesive and related alternative for synergy, integration, and harmonious coexistence that unites folks and nature past borders, in search of wholesome and affluent environments.
The Americas Flyway Initiative (AFI) is a hemispheric, progressive, and visionary method led by The Nationwide Audubon Society, BirdLife Worldwide, and the Growth Financial institution of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) to guard, preserve, and restore nature and handle the biodiversity loss and local weather change disaster throughout the Americas.
After ten months of evolving from idea to motion, AFI was formally introduced at The Local weather Week in New York as a cohesive and related alternative for synergy, integration, and harmonious coexistence that unites folks and nature past borders, in search of wholesome and affluent environments.
AFI is constructing a portfolio for transformative high-level tasks to take advantage of important financial funding within the Americas centered on sustainable improvement tasks to profit native communities and the planet’s welfare and safeguard a vital ecosystem community for migratory and endemic threatened resident birds all through the Western Hemisphere. Important websites on the Pacific Coast of Ecuador and Chile are already being piloted.
Canada Warbler, copyright Glyn Sellors, from the surfbirds galleries
“It is a distinctive and impactful method that addresses local weather change through the use of market-based options, successfully integrating the advantages of nature-based exercise with main financial improvement tasks.” Elizabeth Grey, Nationwide Audubon Society CEO.
The ambition is to determine over thirty important landscapes and seascapes alongside the Americas flyways for pressing conservation, restoration, and administration by native companions, communities, and indigenous peoples. America’s flyways cowl North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, extending throughout 35 international locations, from the Arctic Circle within the north to Tierra del Fuego within the south.
“We’ve obtained to seek out new artistic methods to do issues in a different way, to be daring, to be brave, to kind extra collaborations […] And that’s what the America’s Flyway Initiative is all about […] We should strive wherever we will to lift consciousness concerning the marvel of migratory birds and the significance of the locations the place they stay. As a result of if persons are conscious, they’re extra more likely to care, and in the event that they care, they’re extra more likely to act […] So, to protect these unbelievable locations, to protect the marvel of migrations, protect our migratory species, to make sure that the individuals who name these locations house, we now have to assume and act very, very in a different way. Now we have to be daring. Now we have to take dangers. And I feel that’s precisely what the Americas Flyways Initiative is making an attempt to attain.” Martin Harper, BirdLife Worldwide CEO (Interim).
As former BirdLife Worldwide CEO Patricia Zurita acknowledged, “Conservation with out motion is simply dialog.” AFI is a dynamic platform for decision-makers and the personal sector to achieve nationwide commitments to adjust to the Sustainable Growth Objectives (SDG), the Nationally Decided Contributions (NDC) of the Paris Settlement within the United Nations Framework Conference United States on Local weather Change (UNFCCC), the post-Aichi targets negotiated throughout the Framework of the Conference on Organic Variety (CBD) and the 30 x 30 objectives.
AFI is constructed upon and impressed by the groundbreaking basis launched in 2021 by BirdLife Worldwide, the Asian Growth Financial institution (ADB), and the East Asian Australasian Flyway Partnership. The Americas maintain three of the eight main migratory chicken flyways on this planet, which makes this area pivotal to planetary biodiversity and local weather change response. Nonetheless, stopover and wintering websites are disappearing at an alarming tempo alongside these routes.
Past borders and sectoral silos
Collaboration between sectors and disciplines is crucial to strengthening local weather motion and constructing long-term sustainable improvement. The Americas Flyways Initiative proposes a singular, impactful method to biodiversity conservation by integrating and scaling up nature-based local weather options by main financial improvement tasks designed to incorporate safeguards throughout a community of important habitats for declining populations of shared migratory birds all through the Americas.
Audubon and BirdLife Worldwide will use superior scientific and digital applied sciences to pick out websites, packages, and landscapes essential for biodiversity conservation and group improvement as funding areas. They may even add their community of on-the-ground implementation capability and communications capabilities. CAF brings its huge expertise in sustainable improvement fashions and tasks’ technical and monetary structuring as a part of its dedication to turn into the area’s inexperienced financial institution by financing local weather and biodiversity-friendly tasks.
Modern funding mechanisms from personal and public sources will help this Initiative. It’s a first step in the direction of integrating flyway-wide conservation, communications, monitoring, and the governance wanted to totally help hemispheric conservation at scale for the advantage of birds, biodiversity, nature, and folks.
“Not too a few years in the past, it could have been a uncommon factor to seek out thought leaders from the monetary sector sharing the stage with environmental leaders and strategizing over chicken conservation. It didn’t occur as a result of there was no perceived want. These two worlds didn’t seem to overlap. Right this moment, the worldwide risk of local weather change and species loss has opened all our eyes to how small our world is, how related all of us are — and that each one dwelling issues are, or will, really feel the influence of our altering local weather.” Elizabeth Grey, Nationwide Audubon Society CEO.
“This is a crucial initiative as a result of the three establishments which are taking part right here (BirdLife Worldwide, Audubon and CAF) have very completely different mandates. However on the identical time, actually all of us need the identical factor, which is to guard the setting, to achieve the safety of the 30% of the ecosystem that was agreed upon in Montreal.Wholesome ecosystems for birds are wholesome ecosystems for folks.” Alicia Montalvo, Local weather Motion and Optimistic Biodiversity Supervisor CAF.
Why birds?
“If we preserve birds, we’ll resolve a lot of the world’s environmental issues.” Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, world-renowned ecologist, ‘Godfather of biodiversity’.
With their almost world distribution and excessive sensitivity to environmental modifications, birds are one of the best bioindicators and messengers that inform us about nature’s well being. They’re our early warning system, typically main us to the supply of the issue and its answer. Birds inform us that our survival will depend on a hemispheric answer to mitigate the results of local weather change and handle the biodiversity loss disaster.
Birds act as guardians of life. By safeguarding them, we defend life. If birds do effectively, our planet does it too. The disappearance of single chicken species can throw an ecosystem out of stability, making a knock-on impact that threatens our survival. Extreme inhabitants declines warn us about frequent future threats to biodiversity and folks.
Based on The Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC), limiting warming to round 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires world greenhouse gasoline emissions to be diminished by 43% by 2030. In parallel, a million species could also be pushed to extinction within the subsequent few years due to human stresss, because the UN has acknowledged. This number of dwelling species makes up the security web supporting human life on Earth, offering meals, clear water, air, and vitality, and constructing resilience to local weather change impacts.
The birds misplaced will not be simply threatened or endangered migratory species however frequent and endemic birds. Large biodiversity loss is at our doorstep. From extra frequent and intense fires in California to the lack of snowpacks and glaciers within the Andes, extreme droughts in Chile and Peru, a rise within the quantity and depth of hurricanes within the Caribbean, and the ravaging progress of savannahs within the Amazon, communities, and persons are already experiencing the devastating impacts of local weather change and the destruction of nature.
Our collective scientific and progressive financing fashions will empower conservation actions linking breeding, stopover, and wintering websites and determine precedence websites for birds overlaid with Necessary Chicken Areas (IBA) and Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA). Individuals-responsive options will vary from agroforestry in rural agricultural areas to inexperienced infrastructure driving coastal resilience in city cities.
Now we have seen the unbelievable connection birds could make and the way they create collectively folks, communities, and efforts from a rising and vast number of public, multilateral, and personal organizations that perceive the essential second biodiversity and the way forward for humanity are dealing with. For the primary time within the Western Hemisphere, an initiative addresses systematic points affecting migratory chicken conservation.
AFI represents a real shift within the method to sustainable improvement and biodiversity safety. By bringing within the mandatory assets and technical know-how, we’ll reply to this urgent problem. Collectively, we’re constructing the roadmap that reverses the immense lack of birds and biodiversity within the hemisphere. AFI goals to encourage those that worth the enjoyment of native and migratory birds to carry again hope for the brand new generations.
