After the world missed almost all of its targets to protect fast-dwindling nature for the last decade, observers following a new round of negotiations are focusing as much on how goals will be put in place as the headline targets.

Nearly 200 nations are taking part in talks until Tuesday, aimed at fine-tuning a draft text to preserve biodiversity by 2050, with key milestones at 2030, which will be adopted at the United Nations COP15 conference later this year.

Countries are striving to increase their ambitions in the face of stark warnings that humanity is driving devastating declines in the biodiversity that supports all life on the planet.

But the world failed almost entirely to reach a similar set of 10-year objectives set a decade ago at UN talks in Aichi, Japan.

"The Aichi targets were largely missed because of lack of political will and parties not prioritising them enough," said AFP Anna Heslop, of the NGO ClientEarth, which is following the Geneva talks.

"There was just a lack of implementation. We can't afford to be in that position again in 10 years."

The text under negotiation includes a series of proposals to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

"What we need is a better system for encouraging parties to plan and report, and then the global community needs to do something. It is keeping these three elements is the challenge," said a delegate from a Global North country, who asked not to be named.

- Progress reports -

Member countries should develop stronger action plans to use natural resources sustainably, said the IDDRI think tank said to be more effective.

There should also be a more robust reporting system, with countries periodically measuring progress and passing on data that feeds into a global assessment, it added.

Currently, each country draws up its national biodiversity plan on a different basis, making comparisons difficult.

To address this, the delegations in Geneva are trying to develop common indicators to measure progress.

"Let's put in place mechanisms for collective and individual review, which will increase the pressure and this affects ambitions and implementation at the national level," said Juliette Landry, researcher at IDDRI.

Experts and conservation groups want national action plans to be updated regularly after COP15 with progress reports and a global stocktake before 2030.

That way, nations and the international community can see if they are going off track and increase their efforts.

But more reporting and administration requires more funding, and biodiversity-rich developing countries stress they will need both financial and technological support to meet these obligations.

"You cannot ask people to do spatial planning if they don't have the means," said a delegate from the Global South.

Another IDDRI proposal is the creation of a compliance mechanism, although Landry stressed that this would not be an exercise in finger-pointing.

Instead she said it would show the "gaps between what the countries had planned and what they implemented" and enable problems to be addressed and for countries to share their experiences, she said. So far, there has been little appetite for such a mechanism.

But without one "all of this process is meaningless" said Oscar Soria, of the advocacy group Avaaz.

"Because nobody will take responsibility and nobody will take the convention seriously from the outside," he said.

Invasive ants hit Texas hard - now a killer fungus is coming for them
Washington (AFP) March 28, 2022 - When crazy ants roll into new parts of Texas, the invasive species wipe out local insects and lizards, drive away birds, and even blind baby rabbits by spewing acid in their eyes.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin now have good news: a naturally occurring fungus-like pathogen can be used to reverse their rampant spread across the southeastern United States, where they have wrought havoc for the past 20 years.

The findings were described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ecologist and lead author Edward LeBrun told AFP that the fungus had already driven pockets of the invaders to extinction, and would soon be tested at environmentally-sensitive sites to protect endangered species.

Like fire ants, whom they have displaced in parts of Texas, tawny crazy ants are native to Argentina and Brazil and came to the United States via ships.

They are called "crazy" because of their erratic, jarring movements -- unlike the orderly marches of their cousin species.

While they don't have the venomous bite of fire ants, they secrete formic acid that shields them against fire ant venom, and incapacitates native animals.

"It's kind of a horror show," said LeBrun, who described apocalyptic rivers of ants swarming trees at an infestation site he visited at the Estero Llano Grande State Park, which had lost native ants, insects, scorpions, snakes, lizards and birds to the invaders.

Not only are they destroying ecosystems, "they're miserable to live with" for humans, said LeBrun. The ants seek out electrical systems to nest in, causing shorts in breaker boxes, AC units and sewage pumps.

Pesticides are highly toxic and serve only to slow their progress, leading to snowdrift piles of dead ants that have to be cleared, and the ants eventually break through anyway.

- Trojan ants -

About eight years ago, LeBrun and one of his co-authors Rob Plowes were studying crazy ants they had collected in Florida when they noticed some had unusually large abdomens swollen with fat.

When they looked inside their bodies, the scientists found fungal spores from a microsporidian -- a type of fungal pathogen -- and the species they found was entirely new to science.

Microsporidians commonly hijack an insect's fat cells, turning them into spore factories.

The pathogen's origins aren't clear -- perhaps it came from South America or perhaps from another insect.

Whatever the case, the team found it cropping up across Texas. They observed 15 populations for eight years, finding that every population harboring the pathogen declined, and 60 percent of the populations went completely extinct.

As an experiment, the team decided to place infected ants with uninfected ants at a nesting site inside a state park, placing hot dogs around the exit chambers of a box to entice the two groups to mingle.

The crazy ants form "supercolonies," which means separate groups don't fight each other for territory. This is a great advantage when swarming new areas, but it also turned out to be their biggest weakness, since it allowed the pathogen to spread unchecked.

The test was a huge success, driving the crazy ant population at the state park down to zero within a few years. Larvae that were tended by infected worker ants appeared particularly susceptible.

LeBrun explained this was good news in two ways: first, a pathogen of natural origin was selectively targeting the invasive species, limiting their ability to steamroll local ecosystems.

Second, scientists can accelerate the spread of the pathogen to kill the crazy ants quicker.

He cautioned, however, that the process was labor intensive, not something that could eradicate the species overnight.

The team will continue testing their new biocontrol approach at sensitive Texas habitats this spring.

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Money at the heart of international efforts to save nature
Geneva (AFP) March 27, 2022
Can humanity curb spending that harms the world's biodiversity and instead focus funding on protecting it? That question is at the heart of international negotiations in Geneva, which will set the stage for a crucial United Nations COP 15 biodiversity summit in China later this year. Almost 200 countries are due to adopt a global framework this year to safeguard nature by mid-century from the destruction wrought by humanity, with a key milestone of 30 percent protected by 2030. These ambiti ... read more