Biodiversity and Natural Environment

While 2020 was supposed to be a “decisive year to save biodiversity” with major international events such as the World Conservation Congress and COP15 Biodiversity, another global event, the coronavirus pandemic, itself linked to the biodiversity crisis, has called this calendar into question. The fact remains that the erosion of biodiversity continues: the quality and extent of natural environments continue to decline and the number of threatened species continues to grow.
According to the IPBES, 75% of terrestrial and 66% of marine environments have been “significantly modified by human activities”, “23% of land areas have shown a decline in productivity due to land degradation” and the extinction rate of species has reached nearly one million. Similarly, the European Commission notes in an October 2020 report that the EU “has failed to halt the decline of protected species and habitat types whose conservation status is of concern” and that the “main pressures related to the use of land and water resources still remain”, i.e. intensive agriculture, changes in hydrological regimes, urbanization and pollution. There are different ways to “bring nature back into our lives” as called for in the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy: establishment of protected areas, use of nature-based solutions and combating soil artificialisation (including the development of urban agriculture and urban greening). This is the whole purpose of ecological engineering, which, in addition to working to restore degraded environments, can contribute to reconstituting natural environments.