The Planet Declines While Governments Lag on Meaningful Action—Leaving Environmental Leadership to Private Philanthropy, NGOs, and Grassroots Activists
By Emily Vidovich. Emily has a background in environmental journalism and sustainability and is a member of the George Washington University Class of 2019.
Earth is a “system in peril” approaching “dangerous, irreversible tipping points driven by nature loss and climate change.” These are the findings of the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report, published in October 2024.
Wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73 percent over the past 50 years, the report states. The planet is currently in the midst of its sixth mass extinction, the first mass extinction event caused by humans. Habitat loss and degradation, driven mainly by the human food system, bears primary responsibility for the decline in wild populations.
When nature is damaged, it can no longer provide clean air, water, fertile soil, and various other ecosystem services. Nine essential processes for life on Earth have been identified, as have the limits to which humans can alter these processes—through greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, deforestation, and water usage—before exceeding the safe range in which these processes function.
Humans have already exceeded six of these nine boundaries, making the likelihood of each process experiencing a tipping point much greater. Tipping points can be thought of as watershed moments after which there is rapid, large-scale, and possibly irreversible change to the planet—leaving the viability of Earth in question.
The rapidity of widespread loss of natural spaces and biodiversity has made Earth increasingly vulnerable to tipping points. Because of this, in 2022 global leaders at a United Nations (UN) conference on biodiversity agreed to protect 30 percent of the planet for nature by 2030 as well as restore 30 percent of already degraded ecosystems—both on land and underwater. But at the October 2024 UN biodiversity conference, the UN delegates failed to bring the urgency and ambition necessary to translate these pledges into concrete action.
Scientists, advocates, and environmental experts have expressed fear and alarm at the lack of progress towards achieving the UN’s conservation targets. The UN itself recently reported that, at present, 17.6 percent of land and inland waters and 8.4 percent of oceans and coastal areas are officially protected. To meet the target of 30 percent of the planet protected by 2030, world leaders must protect an area of land as large as Brazil and Australia combined, and an Indian Ocean-sized swathe of ocean.
Many stakeholders—especially in developing nations—have emphasized that they lack the necessary funds for large-scale conservation. But at the recent UN biodiversity conference, world leaders failed to create a funding strategy for raising the pledged $200 billion by 2030, or hold wealthy nations accountable to their pledge to give developing nations $20 billion in funds for the protection of nature by 2025.
In a public statement, the World Resources Institute commented, “finance remains the key sticking point. Most of the world’s biodiversity lies in developing countries that reasonably expect billions rather than millions to support their efforts to protect and restore nature. Yet wealthier countries’ pledges at COP16 fell far short of what is needed to meet their commitments.”
The international lack of political will to allocate more funds to environmental protection reflects the dual-headed problem of a government-reliant approach to protecting the planet—a lack of prioritization of the planet and a willingness by politicians to politicize matters of planetary viability for the sake of their personal political ambitions.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. increased spending on international climate initiatives to a record $11 billion annually; but such funding remains a miniscule portion of the national budget. The Department of Defense, for example, receives over $1 trillion in funding annually.
And entire environmental programs can be endangered during administration changes. The first Trump administration weakened over 100 environmental rules—including exiting from international climate agreements and loosening pollution prevention standards. Trump also initiated the removal of protection from a Florida-sized portion of the nation’s public lands. Further rollbacks of environmental funding and climate-friendly policies are a looming threat of the impending second Trump presidency.
These trends are not unique to the United States. Governments worldwide—particularly those that are the top contributors to climate change—consistently fail to take sufficient action to protect nature or stop climate damaging projects. In Australia, the government spent the last decade approving the Adani Carmichael coal mine. One of the largest coal mines in the world, it began operations in 2021—a direct affront to international climate goals. The mine’s average annual emissions are projected to be greater than the emissions of entire small countries, including Austria and Malaysia.
Some governments are even more blatant—the record-level of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest during the administration of Brazil’s Bolsonaro was as deliberate as that administration’s destruction of environmental protection agencies.
But while governments fumble these critical years for saving the planet, local activists, non-government stakeholders, and private philanthropists continue to rise to the occasion. Whether it means challenging environmentally harmful projects in court, using private funds to create conservation areas, enabling sustainable ocean researchers to thrive, or restoring wildlife populations, non-governmental organizations and the donors that make their work possible have long been the planet’s champions; whether or not they have government support.