New Ecologies / New Meanings

In December 2022, the COP15 for Biodiversity approved the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a protocol for the protection of the planetary ecosystems that complements the Paris Agreement on Climate Change with the aim of preventing the collapse of the biosphere. A global network of areas with varying degrees of naturality and artificiality, capable of halting the loss of biodiversity and reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will extend over 30% of the Earth by 2030 and be further consolidated by 2050. The framework raises a multiplicity of issues engaged by the landscape project: the conservation of species and ecosystems of the biosphere; the environmental rehabilitation of degraded terrestrial and marine areas; the equitable management of ancestral lands and the rights of indigenous peoples; the protection of cultural landscapes and the support for local communities; the abandonment of both the unsustainable exploitation of the territories, as well as their musealisation and vernacularisation in the service of global tourism; the enhancement of the ecological contributions from degraded, exploited or underutilized areas, on the inhabited edges or in the operational hinterlands of planetary urbanization; the assisting of contemporary anthro-ecological systems towards new forms of equilibrium, conventionally defined by the terms of sustainability and resilience.