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Earthday and Batcon Pakistan join hands for Biodiversity Conservation and Restoration in Pakistan

EARTHDAY.ORG and Batcon Pakistan Join hand to achieve a shared goal of Biodiversity Conservation and Restoration of Natural Habitat and Conditions for Wildlife in Pakistan. EARTHDAY.ORG’s mission is to diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide. Growing out of the first Earth Day in 1970, EARTHDAY.ORG is the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 75,000 partners in over 190 countries to drive positive action for our planet.

The Conservation and Biodiversity program will amplify and accelerates transformative societal change to restore and protect biodiversity. This program educates and raises awareness about the accelerating rate of extinction of millions of species and the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. The program is dedicated for the enduring protection of wildlife and their habitats and creating a world in which wildlife and humans successfully coexist through effective engagement.

During the next five years Batcon Pakistan and EARTHDAY.ORG will work together in Pakistan to respond rapidly and effectively to bat conservation crises, preventing the extinction and extirpation of threatened bats as well as adopt proactive approach for curbing bat’s born zoonotic disease spillover event through effective engagement at each level. We will educate key communities and the public at large on the importance of wildlife, especially bats.

Bats are an ecologically and taxonomically diverse group accounting for roughly a fifth of mammalian diversity worldwide. Many of the threats bats face (e.g., habitat loss, bushmeat hunting, and climate change) reflect the conservation challenges of our era. However, compared to other mammals and birds, significantly less is known about the population status of most bat species, which makes prioritizing and planning conservation actions challenging.

 Over a third of bat species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are considered threatened or data deficient, and well over half of the species have unknown or decreasing population trends. That equals 988 species, or 80% of bats assessed by IUCN, needing conservation or research attention. Delivering conservation to bat species will require sustained efforts to assess population status and trends and address data deficiencies. Successful bat conservation must integrate research and conservation to identify stressors and their solutions and to test the efficacy of actions to stabilize or increase populations. Global and regional networks that connect researchers, conservation practitioners, and local stakeholders to share knowledge, build capacity, and prioritize and coordinate research and conservation efforts, are vital to ensuring sustainable bat populations worldwide.