COP28 TOLD ''ACT NOW'' BY CHARLES DARWIN DESCENDENT - CR

CONSUMER READY

STORY: BRAZIL:DARWIN20231122CR
HEADLINE: COP28 TOLD “ACT NOW” BY CHARLES DARWIN DESCENDENT DURATION: 02:32
SOURCE: NATURE POSITIVE
RESTRICTIONS: ACCESS ALL PLATFORMS IN PERPETUITY; NO ARCHIVE RESALES

STORYLINE

Governments must act now to preserve and restore nature before global warming and climate change mean entire species and their habitats are destroyed.

That’s the contention of botanist Sarah Darwin, whose great-great grandfather Charles Darwin is credited with being the father of evolutionary theory.

Speaking from the heart of the Brazilian rainforest, which her famous ancestor investigated almost 200 years ago, she called on world leaders at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai to “stop waging war on nature and find new ways of living in it, in a sustainable way”.

Sarah Darwin is supporting Darwin200, a 40,000 nautical mile voyage retracing Charles Darwin’s journey aboard the HMS Beagle that ignited a scientific revolution. Like Darwin before them, 200 young conservationists will be exploring and documenting the natural world, taking stock of the state of nature almost 200 years on from Darwin’s groundbreaking circumnavigation.

The Darwin200 tall ship sailed into Rio De Janeiro on the latest leg of its epic journey giving those aboard the opportunity to see Brazil’s natural beauty which was chronicled in Charles Darwin’s journals.

My name's Sarah Darwin. I'm a botanist and I work at the Natural History Museum in Berlin as a researcher. And Charles Darwin is my great-great-grandfather.

He taught us that all living things are related. So we share a common origin. We're actually part of nature.

I’m here in the Atlantic Forest at last, experiencing something that Darwin would have experienced. The joy of being here in this pristine, beautiful, stunning forest and I’m really running out of words to describe what it feels like.

Brazil and the Atlantic forest for Darwin were incredibly important. Ever since I read that beautiful text that Darwin wrote in his journal about walking in the Atlantic Forest for the first time, I've wanted to come here. So this is an absolute dream come true for me.

So this year’s COP is all about having a Global Stock Take and with Darwin 200 we are going to be doing exactly that. So these young people are going to be following in the wake of Darwin, nearly 200 years after Darwin. And we are going to be doing a comparison between what Darwin saw, what he collected, what he wrote about in his diaries and journals and we are going to see what the state of the planet is like today.

This forest used to cover the entire coast of the Atlantic coast of Brazil, but now it's reduced to just under 10%.

You know, we're part of nature and at the moment we're waging war on nature and we need to admit that we're part of it and find new ways of living in it in a sustainable way

What I hope to see at COP about nature is action. We've had a lot of scientific research. We've had a lot of studies. We really all know what's going on. And now we need to take action. We need to preserve, for example, the forests that we have. And we need to restore what we've lost.