Save Our Happy Place is a climate action newsletter dedicated to making it easy for you to help protect the places you love from climate change, written by Lindsay Nunez. Read on for simple yet effective climate actions, and sustainable + eco-friendly lifestyle tips.

Hello there, Sunshine! After Earth Week’s moment of reflection on our relationships with Mother Nature, I’d like to give you outlets to harness that energy and find new ways to take action working directly with the protection of nature. This week we’re examining Earth’s beauty through the lens of biodiversity and what we can do from both personal and systemic levels to take action.

Earth’s Biodiversity

And Its part in climate change mitigation

Biodiversity: the variety and variability of life on Earth

Maintaining and restoring Earth’s biodiversity is a super effective nature-based solution to warding off the worse effects of climate change. Biodiversity in these restored and conserved habitats removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Excess CO2 created by humans in the atmosphere is the main driver of climate change.

Protecting mangroves, seagrass fields, old-growth forests, rainforests, and even whale populations all help capture incredible amounts of CO2.

We're close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops - we rely on handful of grain crops and plants that we've refined and bred over hundreds of years.

- Paul Watson

Causes of Biodiversity Loss

Unfortunately, we are seeing rapid biodiversity loss at a rate estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. Before we get into what you can do help biodiversity loss, here are a few of the main causes.

• Climate Change

• Pollution

• Destruction of Habitats

• Invasive Alien Species

• Overexploitation of the Natural Environment

Personal Action

Personal Choices to Help Mitigate Biodiversity Loss

Using your power as a consumer and investor sends signals to the market about what is important to your purchasing decisions and denotes basic supply and demand. While reducing consumption overall is a strong place to start, there are some things that we just have to buy and we can always be more mindful.

• When you shop for new products make sure they minimize the impact on biodiversity. Some product types that are culprits in biodiversity loss are beef, soy, palm oil, and wood products.

• Put your money where your values are. Invest in projects that promote biodiversity and help the climate. Check out Green Portfolio on where to get started.

• Reduce your waste around consumer goods like food, clothes, electrical appliances, etc.

Systemic Action

Think beyond parks and protected areas

Our Earth’s biodiversity potential is so much greater than what is being protected through parks and other protected areas. We need to halt deforestation and other exploitations projects that destroy nature.

Support and/or get involved in biodiversity projects that:

• Focus on deforestation, big agriculture, and suburban sprawl, like campaigns with Rainforest Alliance Network, and Regenerate America.

• Take political action, like making your voice heard around the U.S. 2023 Farm Bill.

• Focus on local and regional projects that you can actively and consistently partake in. These will likely be led by local conversation groups.