The COVID‐19 Pandemic Not Only Poses Challenges, but Also Opens Opportunities for Sustainable Transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted social, economic, and environmental systems worldwide, slowing down and reversing the progress made in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs belong to the 2030 Agenda to transform our world by tackling humankind's challenges to ensure well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. We explore the potential impacts of the pandemic on SDGs for Nepal. We followed a knowledge co-creation process with experts from various professional backgrounds, involving five steps: online survey, online workshop, assessment of expert's opinions, review and validation, and revision and synthesis. The pandemic has negatively impacted most SDGs in the short term. Particularly, the targets of SDG 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 13 have and will continue to have weakly to moderately restricting impacts. However, a few targets of SDG 2, 3, 6, and 11 could also have weakly promoting impacts. The negative impacts have resulted from impeding factors linked to the pandemic. Many of the negative impacts may subside in the medium and long terms. The key five impeding factors are lockdowns, underemployment and unemployment, closure of institutions and facilities, diluted focus and funds for non-COVID-19-related issues, and anticipated reduction in support from development partners. The pandemic has also opened a window of opportunity for sustainable transformation, which is short-lived and narrow. These opportunities are lessons learned for planning and action, socio-economic recovery plan, use of information and communication technologies and the digital economy, reverse migration and “brain gain,” and local governments' exercising authorities

<b>Nepal’s National Red List of Birds</b>

The main objectives of the Nepal National Bird Red Data Book were to provide comprehensive and up-to-date accounts of all the bird species found in Nepal, assess their status applying the IUCN Guidelines at Regional Levels, identify threats to all bird species and recommend the most practical measures for their conservation.  It is hoped that the Bird RDB will help Nepal achieve the Convention on Biological Diversity target of preventing the extinction of known threatened species and improving their conservation status.  As population changes of Nepal’s birds have been studied for only a few species, assessments of species’ national status were mainly made by assessing changes in distribution.  Species distribution maps were produced for all of Nepal’s bird species except vagrants and compared to maps that were produced in 1991 using the same mapping system.  Of the 878 bird species recorded, 168 species (19%) were assessed as nationally threatened. These comprise 68 (40%) Critically Endangered species, 38 (23%) Endangered species and 62 (37%) Vulnerable species.  A total of 62 species was considered Near Threatened and 22 species Data Deficient.  Over 55% of the threatened birds are lowland grassland specialists, 25% are wetland birds and 24% tropical and sub-tropical broadleaved forest birds.  Larger birds appear to be more threatened than smaller birds with 98 (25%) non-passerine species threatened and 67 (14%) passerine species.  Habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation are the most important threats.  Other threats include chemical poisoning, over-exploitation, climate change, hydropower, invasive species, intensification of agriculture, disturbance, and limited conservation measures and research.  Measures to address these threats are described.  It was also concluded that re-assessments of the status of certain bird groups carried out every five years and the setting up of a national online system for storing and reporting bird sightings would be useful.</p