Are climate change and biodiversity loss linked?

Why in the NEWS?

• Climate change and biodiversity loss are interlinked, according to the recently released Nexus Report.

Key Points

• The report, the first of its kind to look at the interlink ages between climate change and biodiversity loss, has been produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a global group of scientific experts.
• This new scientific report has highlighted the strong interconnections between some of the biggest challenges facing humanity, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and hunger.
• The report has emphasised the need to adopt an integrated approach in addressing these issues.
• According to the report, trying to tackle these challenges separately while ignoring interactions and impacts with others is not only likely to be ineffective, but also counterproductive.
• The group examined five major challenges – climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, water scarcity and health risks – and found that they are strongly interconnected.
• "They interact, interpenetrate and compound each other in such a way that isolated efforts to address them are ineffective and counterproductive," the report says.
• It says the way economic activities are currently being conducted is having a very negative impact on biodiversity, climate change, food production, water and health.
• The unaccounted cost of these adverse impacts is estimated to be at least $10-25 trillion per year.

What does the latest report say?

• The latest assessment of IPBES is called the Nexus Report, which has highlighted the strong interlink ages 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.
• 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. 
• 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.

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

• HEADQUARTER – BONN (GERMANY)
• IPBES is for biodiversity and natural ecosystems what the famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is for climate change.
• It periodically examines all existing scientific knowledge on biodiversity and nature to assess their current state.
• The information provided by the IPCC, which came into being in 1988, has formed the scientific basis for climate change negotiations.
• The much younger IPBES, established in 2012, informs many multilateral environmental processes, including 
  • The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 
  • The Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), 
  • The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, 
  • The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and 
  • The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.
• IPBES produced its first report in 2019 in which it assessed threats to global biodiversity.
• That report found that nearly one million of an estimated eight million species of plants and animals were threatened with extinction, more than at any previous time.
• It said about 75 percent of the Earth’s land surface and 66 percent of marine environments had been “significantly altered,” and more than 85 percent 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.

STRUCTURE OF IPBES