Society cannot afford to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises separately
“Society cannot afford to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises separately “
- New review study released in the journal Science offers new solutions for combating climate change and biodiversity loss
Anthropogenic climate change and the intensive use and destruction of natural ecosystems that underpin global biodiversity loss continue to worsen. In this regard, the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis are often viewed as two separate catastrophes. An international team of researchers call for adopting a new perspective. In their review study just released in the journal Science, they recommend complying with the 1.5-degree target while protecting and restoring at least 30 percent of all land, freshwater and marine zones for which they call for interdisciplinary collaboration between institutions, which often operate independently, to help to urgently transform current economic and political systems behind the double crisis.
Human beings have massively changed the Earth’s system. Greenhouse-gas emissions produced by human activities have caused the global mean temperature to rise by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial era. And every year, there are additional emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases, currently amounting to more than 55 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. This unprecedented climate crisis has consequences for the entire planet – the distribution of precipitation is shifting, the global sea level is rising, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, the ocean is becoming more acidic, and anoxic zones continue to expand.
“The climate crisis they themselves caused is likely the greatest challenge that homo sapiens have faced in their 300,000-year history,” says Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, from the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and who has been Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II, tasked with assessing the current state of knowledge on global warming impacts, since 2015. Pörtner states that “yet at the same time another, equally dangerous crisis is unfolding, one that is often overlooked – the dramatic loss of plant and animal species across the planet. The two catastrophes – the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis – are interdependent and mutually amplifying, which is why they should never be seen as two separate things”. The newly released review study in the journal Science shows in detail the connections between the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis and presents solutions for addressing both catastrophes and mitigating their social impacts, which are already dramatic.
The article is the outcome of an international scientific workshop held in December 2020 jointly coordinated by two organisations belonging to the United Nations: the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). Prof. Unai Pascual from the Baque Centre for Climate Change and one of the authors of the study describe the rapidly worsening loss of biodiversity highlighting that “human activities have altered roughly 75 percent of the land surface and 66 percent of the marine waters on our planet. And have done so to such an extent that today e.g. approximately 80 percent of the biomass from mammals and 50 percent of plant biomass has been lost, while more species are in danger of extinction than at any time in human history”. Pascual adds that “in this regard, global warming and the destruction of natural habitats not only lead to biodiversity loss but also reduce the capacity of organisms, soils and sediments to store carbon, which in turn exacerbates the climate crisis.”
In order to address these multiple crises, the researchers who have assessed the scientific evidence propose an ambitious combination of emissions reduction, restoration and protection measures, intelligent land-use management, and promoting cross-institutional competencies among political actors.
The study’s authors call for tackling climate change while embracing a modern approach to land-use management, one in which protected areas are not viewed as isolated refuges for biodiversity. Rather, they argue that they need to be part of a world-spanning network on land and sea alike that interconnects comparatively untouched regions via migration corridors for the species. This needs to be done by also promoting intensified carbon dioxide uptake and carbon fixation in biomass and soils. Pascual states that “the double environmental crisis is already impacting society at many levels, especially worsening equity and the adaptive capacities of already vulnerable societies around the world. Climate protection and biodiversity conservation need to go hand in hand and policy interventions are needed which offer social advantages for local communities and Indigenous peoples who have historically helped to cool the Planet and to safeguard much of the global biodiversity today”.
Hans-Otto Pörtner also calls for institutionalizing joint global efforts: “We’re unlikely to reach the new global biodiversity, climate and sustainability targets planned for 2030 and 2050 if the individual institutions fail to collaborate more intensively. Take for example the separate UN conventions on biodiversity and climate protection, i.e., the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They address the two crises too separately and are also focused on the national interests of the parties to the conventions. Here, we urgently need a comprehensive approach if we still hope to reach the targets.”