World leaders pledge to protect nature. The U.S., Brazil and Australia aren’t among them.

LONDON — A million species of plants and animals including Asian elephants, orangutans and blue whales are now at risk of extinction, according to the United Nations.Last month, 70 world leaders signed the “Leaders Pledge for Nature” and vowed to take steps to halt the catastrophic human-made decline.There were three notable exceptions among those who didn’t sign — President Donald Trump, his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.Their rejection wasn’t a complete surprise. All have historically been reluctant to commit to stronger action on the environment — and actually, in the cases of Trump and Bolsonaro, reversed the progress.Their stances are increasingly pitting them against much of the world, which says it will try and tackle the crises of climate change and the mass extinction of the planet’s biodiversity — the entire living world from the insects that pollinate our crops to the largest whales in our seas and the trees in our forests.Many leaders are now projecting “a completely different message,” because there is wider acknowledgement that destruction of the natural world makes further devastating pandemics more likely, Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, said.There is also a growing awareness that our food systems and economic prosperity rely on nature and a realization that this really is “our last chance” to act, she added.“These myriad interactions of life underpin fundamental processes that our food production systems rely on, that stabilize our climate, that makes the planet livable,” Julia Jones, a professor at Bangor University in Wales, in the United Kingdom, said “If the general public realized just how bad it was, it would shock them.”The U.S., Brazil and Australia account for a large percentage of the planet’s land surface area and particularly in the case of Brazil, home to some of its most important biodiversity.Although the Amazon is home to 10 percent of the known species, deforestation — primarily for farming beef — has increased under Bolsonaro with 2020 setting new records for burning.Global wildlife population decline is most severe in the tropics of Latin America — including the Amazon — where it is down on average by 94 percent in just 50 years, according to a recent World Wildlife Fund report.Trump, meanwhile, has overseen a weakening of environmental standards, approved oil and gas leasing in an Alaskan wildlife reserve, and reviewed the status of federally protected lands. He’s also in the process of withdrawing the U.S. — one of the few countries not party to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity — from the Paris Agreement.Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, which releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the air when burned. These gases trap heat in our atmosphere, causing global warming.Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politicsMorrison leads a government that

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