Climate change and biodiversity loss are connected: Key takeaways from NEXUS report

A new major scientific report has highlighted the strong interlinkages between some of the biggest challenges facing humankind such as climate change, biodiversity loss and hunger, and emphasised on the need for adopting an integrated approach in addressing these issues.

Trying to deal with these challenges separately, while ignoring the interactions with and influences on others, was not just likely to be ineffective, but also counterproductive, according to the report.

The report, the first of its kind looking at the interconnections between these multiple crises, has been produced by Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a global group of scientific experts. The group examined five major challenges — climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, water scarcity, and health risks — and found that they were strongly interconnected.

“They interact, cascade and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive,” the report said.

It said the manner in which economic activities were currently being carried out had big negative impacts on biodiversity, climate change, food production, water and health. The unaccounted-for costs of these adverse effects are estimated to be at least $10-25 trillion a year.

What is IPBES?

IPBES is to biodiversity and natural ecosystems what the more famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to climate change. It periodically examines all the existing scientific knowledge on biodiversity and nature to make an assessment of their current state. Just like IPCC, IPBES too does not produce new science. It only evaluates the existing knowledge to make consolidated assessments.

The information provided by IPCC, which came into being in 1988, have formed the scientific basis for climate change negotiations. The much younger IPBES, set up in 2012, informs several multilateral environmental processes, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Convention on Combating Desertification (CCD), the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

IPBES produced its first report in 2019 in which it assessed the threat to global biodiversity. That report found that as many as one million different species of plants and animals, out of an estimated eight million in total, were facing extinction threats, more than at any previous time, mainly due to the changes in natural ecosystems caused by human activities. It had said nearly 75 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and 66 per cent of marine environments had been “significantly altered”, and over 85 per cent of wetlands had been “lost”.

The information in this report became the basis for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, an international agreement that was finalised in 2022. This agreement set 23 targets to be met by 2030 in order to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. These include what are known as the 30 x 30 targets — protecting at least 30 per cent of the land, freshwater and oceans, and restoring at least 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

What does the latest report say?

The latest assessment of IPBES is called the Nexus Report, which has highlighted the strong interlinkages between the five identified global challenges. Its key takeaway is that responses to all these challenges need to be harmonised so that positive actions taken on any one of these does not result in negative impacts on others, something that is quite possible, as exemplified in several current approaches.

For example, an attempt to scale up food production, a positive action to deal with hunger and malnutrition, could have the unintended consequence of increasing stress on land and water resources and biodiversity. Exclusive focus on climate change could also go down on the same pathway. Similarly, protecting land and oceans could restrict choices on climate change and food security.

The report, therefore, argues that it was important to adopt synergistic approaches that deliver benefits across the spectrum.

Such synergistic approaches were available, the report said, and identified over 70 response options that produced positive outcomes across the five elements. Examples of such response measures included restoration of carbon-rich ecosystems such as forests, soils and mangroves, effective management of biodiversity to reduce risks of diseases spreading from animals to humans, promotion of sustainable healthy diets, and reliance on nature-based solutions wherever possible.

There were other response options that deliver benefits on two or three elements but not all. These were important but needed to be implemented carefully, the report said.

It said that the effort must be to find, and implement, actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption while also conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

How is damaging biodiversity leading to economic loss?

The report emphasised that nature and biodiversity were important not just for ecological and aesthetic reasons but also for purely economic reasons. It pointed out that more than half of the global GDP — about 58 trillion dollars worth of annual economic activity — was moderately to highly dependent on nature. Deterioration of natural ecosystems, therefore, could directly hurt productivity and adversely impact economic output.

As it is, the world has been witnessing biodiversity decline at the rate of about 2-6 per cent on an average every decade over the last half a century, the report said. It also highlighted that existing economic systems still offered trillions of dollars in incentives every year for actions that have direct negative impacts on biodiversity and natural ecosystems.

In another report released simultaneously, IPBES called for fundamental and transformative shifts in the way people view and interact with the natural world in pursuit of its well-being.

This report, being called the Transformative Change Report, said current, and previous, approaches to deal with ecological decline had failed, and a new and different approach was needed to halt the slide further.

This new and transformative approach, it said, must be based on four fundamental principles — equity and justice, pluralism and inclusion, respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships, and adaptive learning and action.

It said the world needed to act immediately on such new approaches because the cost of delaying action would significantly increase the costs, almost doubling in just about a decade. There were also economic benefits to be had from immediate action. It said recent estimates suggested that more than 10 trillion dollars in business opportunities, and about 400 million jobs, could be generated by 2030 through sustainable economic approaches that rely on nature-positive economic models.