♪ >> time for a quick check of the headland here on al jazeera. france has suspended joint operations with malia's forces. an interim president was declared president on friday. we have more from the capital. >> in effect what this temporary separation of corporation with e mali army means the french forces will not clear the way before there are operations longed by malian forces.

if malian soldiers are wounded they will not be repatriated in french helicopters nor will they share intelligence with the malian forces. it will have a detrimental effect on security in mali. >> israeli's benjamin netanyahu has called on allies to abandon a coalition that could remove him from power. eight parties had made a deal to form a coalition government, but it still needs to be passed in parliament. netanyahu accused his rival, naftali bennett of selling out. the u.s. defense secretary is promising continued support to israel regardless of who leads the country. lloyd austin held talks with his israeli counterpart, benny gantz, in washington, d.c.. he also said the security of palestinian's must be assured. security forces in sudan have closed of all major roads

leading to government and military headquarters in the capital of khartoum. it follows protests marking the second anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. the u.s. has outlined how it will share vaccines with the rest of the world. by donor says nearly 19 million doses will go to latin america, asia, and africa, as part of a sharing program called kovacs. an additional 6 million doses will be given to countries like india that have experienced a surge, through a program called covax. those are the headlines. the news continues here on al jazeera after "inside story." ♪

planet earth is being run on credit, with more and more resources being used up than can be sustained. but there is a rescue plan. are we up to the challenge? this is "inside story." ♪ hello and welcome to the program. i am peter. fromfarmlands, the world's ecosystems are being degraded and destroyed, and the you and environment program says the situation is passed to the point where conservation alone can turn things around. at the moment, the equivalent of 1.6 earths are needed to

naturally supply what people are consuming. 80% of the world population is running ecological deficits, and encroaching on animal habitats creates ideal conditions for pathogens like the one that called the global pandemic across to humans. to put it another way, we are creating an overlap between animal and meant for more coronaviruses. so, what to do? to start, the u.n. environmental program once a program to rehabilitate one billion hectares of land in the next decade, roughly the size of china. the head of the you and environmental program told al jazeera it can be done. >> that billion hectares that we have overexploited and degraded through our human activity, we

need to put back into working order because we still need to feed the world. we still need to ensure we can live as humanity. we cannot do that if we continue to degrade the very land that sustains us. so the opportunity is we protect what has not been interfered with, but we put back into working land that which we have degraded. it is doable. each one of us know it from our back gardens, or from the fields where we work. if we give nature half a chance, it will bounce back. it just needs a helping hand. this is an initiative where we are working with the finance sector. obviously, we need to have farming on board, governments, science, and communities, to move on restoration. but it will be essential for food and for climate. ♪ peter: ok. let's bring in our guests on "inside story." from new delhi, ceo of international forum for

environmental sustainability. in nairobi, the ceo of the african wildlife foundation. and joining us from rome, a professor of political economy at the university of pretoria. welcome to you all. in a new delhi, we are coming to you first. explain to our audience why this is happening faster than it should be happening, and still is happening fast despite all our efforts. chandra: i think it is important to understand that there is a fundamental reason, and it is poverty. land is degraded because it is extensively used by poor people for food, father. if you want that land to be restored, you would have to provide alternatives. unfortunately, over the last 30 or 40 years, we have not been able to eradicate poverty, and,

therefore, intensive use of land . that is a fundamental reason why degradation continues. why deforestation is still an important issue. we need to put a lot more resources if we want to reverse this. i have a difference of opinion with what the unit is saying. land is not the easiest. we have the historical experience of trying to reverse land degradation and we have not been able to do it because we always think it is the easiest thing to do. unfortunately, it is the toughest thing to do because the largest number of people depend on land and they are the poorest people. if we really want to reverse this, we have to seriously think about how do we reduce poverty, reduce intensive dependence on

land, and how do we mobilize resources. then only we will be able to do it. peter: ok, that is a lot to talk about. curtiss in nairobi we are talking about farmland and forests, and talking about the impacts on our oceans. do we need to break it down into those three specific areas or should we just be collected and ecosystem? curtis: it is a world health issue. we cannot separate those things. what produces the -- what pollutes the oceans comes from land. what pollutes land comes from the actions we take. like my colleague just described, degradation is mostly driven by the choices we are making in and through fighting poverty, or enrichment

of a few people that our driving economies of this world. that is where the issue exists. it is an economic issue driven by the choices the human species is making in managing natural resources. peter: lorenzo in rorome, this document, this report, this clarion call for all of us to do something, uses the word "nature ." in the context of what we are discussing here, what is nature? it feels like a very old-fashioned word. lorenzo: it is a very important word. some of us need to realize that we are an important part of nature. i think colby reminded us -- covid reminded us. we die, we get sick. it is enough that we are out of balance with our natural system

so we may experience tremendous, terrible economic consequences. i am happy to be part of this debate and to be from rome, because i don't want it to be a debate about what the developing world needs to do, right? land degradation happened in the west long before in asia and africa. deforestation massively happened in europe. it is not just a problem for the so-called developing world, but it is a problem for everyone, and it is time we need to reforest the world. we need to start re -wilding cities in europe and africa. it is not a stack for of -- a task for other continents it is for the globe. the ability that nature has to restore itself, to progress quickly, and to counter some of the negative effects of climate change is extremely impressive.

we need to be part of the process. we need to be part of nature and facilitate this forestation process. we will enjoy the consequences not just as natural beings but also as economic beings. it will be a good thing for the economy and for our personal health. peter: chandra bhushan in new delhi. the point lorenzo makes, one guest we had at the point of the show said the planet can fix itself, but we need to give the planet the tools to do that. did we see a glimpse of that during the height of the pandemic around the world, lorenzo is talking about re- wilding our cities. we saw wildlife coming back to our cities around the world. we saw pollution levels drop, we saw people soundbite on this channel and other channels

saying i used to live in a polluted area but it is not polluted now because no one is traveling? chandra: covid showed us what a clean environment looks like. 100 millimeters from daily, we could see the mountains clearly which we could not see generally. people could see wildlife. we had clean air and clean water. all of that was good, but within a month of opening the economy, we saw a tremendous increase. that also tells you how deeply interlinked the environment is to the economic growth story. it is an economy story. that is what it is about. historically we have seen this, in the -- of 1916, we had improvement in environmental quality. there is a written record of that.

but post that, we had the booming economy. after that we had the international -- market in the u.s.. so post-pandemic has always been destructive to the environment. we saw what happened with the stimulus during the banking period, where investment in fossil fuels actually increased. i am not sure the world is learning the lessons from covid. it is nice to speak about it and it is doable, but when it comes to the crux both in terms of the stimulus and in terms of policy, i don't see a movement toward green -- peter: let me put -- i think what you are saying, to our guest in nairobi. i am guessing you are nodding enthusiastically listening to chandra bhushan in new delhi, i am guessing from your vantage

point, you want to see the developing countries being engaged in a dialogue with the developed countries, so the developed countries cannot adopt the quasi-ecosystem moral high ground here and tell developing countries what to do. this is a two-way street of corporation. otherwise inequalities will get greater surely. >> absolutely. and i have bad news, because the population of africa at one point, about 1.2 billion people today, is going to more than double in 10 years. doubling the population of africa and managing nature is going to depend on how africa addresses poverty. a multi-economic model is going to be developed. the choice africa is going to make is going to

determined whether all the steps north america, europe, and some parts of asia have taken on addressing global climate change, for example. if africa chooses a different model of an economy and is helped by the developed countries around the way, we shall have a better world. the idea that the world, that the rest of the world is going to fix climate change without helping the developing world to develop better, to develop different from the weight europe or north america developed, we are kidding ourselves. i will give you an example. currently africa is under one pound of carbon per person in terms of pollution. india is almost two.

. we have similar population numbers. india is about 1.3 billion people, just like africa is now. but the population of africa is already determined in the next 40 years. we know that africa is below 30, majority of africans. that population is going to double. if they use energy at the current level india is using, we know that climate change solution is out of our way pardon me for interrupting, i just want to go to lorenzo in room now. going back to the idea of re-wilding our towns our cities and our urban areas, the percentage of statistics in this report are convincing. if you take 50% of industrialized land around the

world back to what it used to be, you can stop, literally stopped dead 60% of predicted species' extinctions by the year 2030. that is a very easy equation. and yet prime ministers, presidents, economy ministers, finance ministers, energy minister's around the road, they don't seem to be particularly engaging with a very simple message. i think it was gandhi that said, "be the change you want to be and work with people, yeah, to paraphrase what he said -- >> be that change you want to be in the world. peter: right, some clever guy said that. how do we get people to do this? do we tax them or incentivize them? lorenzo: there are many tools. let me also emphasize the fact that prime ministers and governments are wrong.

governments have been socialized into a different understanding of economic development. many people are realizing that our concept of economic growth has to be rethought. what my friend from india and kenya were saying, that the developed world has to help the developing world, i would go further and say that the developed world has to take responsibility for the damage it has generated. and also realize, it should be an example for the rest of the road. when you look at the whole planet, there are interesting experiences. for instance, paying farmers not to destroy nature, but to restore and support ecosystems because they play an important function in the economy. supporting governments and states that protect mother nature, that protect wildlife, as a global taxation mechanisms. the proceedings should go to governments that have nature

reserves and so on and so forth. we should also have incentives, because people react to incentives to consume better. not to consume more, but to consume better. instead, because of our obsession with economic growth, which is a stupid economic model, we continue thinking that in order to develop, we need to consume more. we are generating waste and we have a lot of health and environmental issues to deal with. so, consuming better rather than consuming more. our fiscal method -- consuming methods have to change. academics have argued that we have the tools to do so, the financial tools. what is missing is the political will. i think this is the time, after covid, for everyone to unite behind these findings to say, " we don't want to wait anymore, we want a better economy. we don't want to die from the next pandemic. we want to make sure natural conditions will be ideal for

life, and we want to make sure we will not experience so much poverty because that turns into a global problem, and it is, again, impacting our economy." peter: chandra bhushan, less than 1% of global gdp would get us out of this hole, but in case people think we're just sitting here, international governments, prime ministers and presidents, globally we spend more than $130 billion on helping nature. which countries are doing it right, and which countries are doing it wrong? chandra: i don't think any country -- this is not a black-and-white answer. some countries are trying to do right. others are not. frankly speaking, i think our overreliance on government is also a problem. if we really want to rewild the

nature, then the private sector and communities is equally important. we have seen what happens in international negotiations. i think we have to give a chance to communities and the private sector to come together and provide a helping hand. there are tools, both financial, as well as institutional tools to allow communities to do it. we have seen experience from across the world that community management of the nature is successful. they do very well. much better than what governments do. as far as the private sector is concerned, i think we have to use both incentives and disincentives. right now there is neither an incentive nor a disincentive for them. the time has come where the city and the private -- when the

community and the private sector both have to get involved in making sure that the decade of ecosystem -- we are talking about has some degree of census. peter: condo sabrina inevitably, it would be a foolhardy prime minister to tax people. the same apply to other prime ministers. we spend, as a global community, trillions of dollars a year looking after ourselves. how do we repurpose that expenditure? say for every thousand rials i spent at doha, and goes to something that is good for the planet. how does that happen? kaddu: i think the answer is going to be in changing this conversation, there really talk about nature. we talk about nature as if it is

separate from our aspirations, as if somehow we will make something from something else to take care of nature. those two need to be brought together. conservation or protection or managing nature is not hard in itself. we need to have a different separation so that we see that how we depend on nature or any form of life on earth, whether it is economical aspirations that we need to take care of where water comes from, that we need for factories, for agriculture, and for domestic use. we know where that comes from. we need to have a conversation on the things we need and how nature contributes to them and forget about incentives that are going to come from somewhere else other than nature. the conversation, the right conversation is streamlining biodiversity in our livelihoods

and in our --. structure economies that rely on conservation and sustainability of our nature in order for us to have livelihoods. i think that separation has brought us to where we are. here in africa, the conversation should be how do we streamline -- what is the role of biodiversity in africa's aspirations? once we answer that question, it will be easier for us to task people, if you are in agriculture, what is that to do with forests? a big part of our energy is from hydropower generation. peter: lorenzo in rome, if this is not done and done soon,

because there is definitely a sense of urgency coming from people like the report authors here, is this a crisis that is a -- that is irreversible? lorenzo: yes, and it will have -- it will be not only an existential threat but an immediate financial threat. i understand a lot of people don't care about existential threats, planetary destruction, although i think intelligent species should care. a lot of people care about their pockets. if we don't take care of this crisis, we will have to pay a lot of money. jobs will be lost. likelihoods will be gone. property values will drop. it has already happened. look at florida. value in properties has dropped and market prices because of the risk of natural disasters. the same is happening in australia. rich people have lost a lot of money for not taking care of the

land and the environment within which they live. i am trying to say this because it needs to be clear first and foremost that this is a problem for everyone. it is also a financial and economic problem if we do not take care of it. we should have done a lot of years ago. we have not done it because we did night crisis then. we have postponed decisions. we are still dillydallying, sitting on the fence. this is becoming more expensive every minute that we wait. the report tells us that we know exactly what needs to be done. what needs to be done will not lead us toward a worse, personal, social or human condition. it will lead to a better economy that will be more prosperous, and also that will allow us to thrive better. we will not have to spend so much money to treatnk ourselves. we will not get as sick as we get now. we will not have as many social ills as we have now.

it is a desirable economy. not understanding this issue of separation, not understanding that if we separate human beings from nature, both are going to lose, is really an element of stability in our species. overcoming that stupidity will be the most incredible and important step in our generation. peter: that is an apt point. think you all very much for joining us, our guests were chandra bhushan, kaddu sebunya, and lorenzo fioramonti. you can see the show anytime at aljazerra.com or our facebook page, and you can also follow the chart on twitter. @ajinsidestory is our handle. we will see you soon. for the moment, bye-bye. ♪

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