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‘Cities are becoming the fulcrum for how we manage biodiversity’

Andrew Gonzalez
Published: 6 December 2022

As Montreal prepares to host UN Biodiversity Conference, McGill professor Andrew Gonzalez discusses how cities can help protect nature and human health.

Global urban populations are projected to increase to nearly five billion by 2030. This ever-expanding urbanization threatens our world’s plant and animal biodiversity and degrades ecosystems through the loss of habitat, biomass and carbon storage. As noted during the recent COP27 climate conference, biodiversity loss is as critical to our planet’s health as the climate crisis.

“Think of the ways in which trees cool urban temperatures in the summer, how wetlands provide resilience during storms, and the many ways in which urban green spaces give us health benefits and provide spaces to play and relax,” says Andrew Gonzalez, Professor and Liber Ero Chair in Biodiversity in the Department of Biology of 㽶Ƶ. “We need to take a ‘One Health’ approach to nature and human health.”

Founding director of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science(QCBS), Gonzalez has spoken at TEDx and the World Economic Forum on the sixth mass extinction and resilient ecosystems for urban sustainability. Recently, he took part in the G7 Research Summit on One Health held in Lake Louise, Alberta, this November.

Gonzalez will serve as a scientific observer at the COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference, which is convening governments from around the world to agree on global action through 2030 that will halt and reverse nature loss. The conference will be held in Montreal, the seat of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, from December 7 to 19.

Read Allyson Rowley's full piece in the Reporter: 

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