Major report connects the dots between world’s nature challenges

Climate change, nature loss and food insecurity are all interconnected and will not be tackled as separate issues, a major report has warned.

Review of scientific evidence by Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Found that governments are underestimating or ignoring the connections between five key areas – biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.

The report says this “silent” approach has unintended consequences, such as harming biodiversity through tree-planting schemes, or polluting rivers while increasing food production.

The latest assessment was approved at a meeting of about 150 countries in Windhoek, Namibia.

Paula Harrison, co-chair of the report and professor of land and water modeling at the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology, said understanding the interdependencies between different sectors is “crucial” to tackling crises affecting the natural world.

“Our current governance systems often have different departments, they are working at different levels, they are very fragmented,” he said.

“Often these links are not even acknowledged or ignored and that means you can get unintended consequences or trade-offs that come up because people were not thinking in a holistic way.”

He said the report had identified more than 70 solutions to tackle the problems holistically, many of which were low-cost.

Examples cited in the report include the disease bilharzia, which causes long-term health problems for more than 200 million people worldwide, particularly in Africa.

Treating the problem as a health problem through medication leads to people becoming infected again.

A different approach in rural Senegal tackled water pollution and invasive plants that are habitat for snails, which host disease-carrying parasitic insects, resulting in gains in health and biodiversity.

The report also found:

• More than half the world’s population – especially in developing countries – lives in areas affected by the greatest impacts of declines in biodiversity, water and food.
• Biodiversity – the richness and diversity of all life on Earth – is declining everywhere, primarily as a result of human actions, with “direct and serious impacts” on food security and nutrition, water, health and well-being, and resilience to climate change. It is falling.
• Delaying the action needed to meet policy goals will also increase the costs of meeting them. For example, delayed action on biodiversity targets could double the ultimate costs – while increasing the likelihood of species extinction.

The report also looked at future challenges and scenarios, focusing on the period up to 2050 and 2100.

It found that under the current “business as usual” trend, the consequences would be extremely bad for biodiversity, water quality and human health.

Tackling just one area in isolation will likely lead to negative consequences in other areas. For example, focusing solely on climate change could have negative consequences for areas such as biodiversity and food, reflecting competition for land.

“There are future scenarios that will have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co-benefits across nexus elements,” Professor Harrison said.

“The scenarios with the greatest benefits in the future will be with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and climate change mitigation and adaptation,” he said. “