IPBES’ nexus assessment concludes that environmental, social, and economic crises—such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks, and climate change—are all interconnected, and need interlinking solutions.
By Busani Bafana
WINDHOEK & BULAWAYO, Dec 17 2024 – Biological diversity is on the decline worldwide, and current approaches to address its loss have been piecemeal and ineffective in tackling the crisis facing nature—this is despite estimates that over half of global GDP (USD 58 trillion of economic activity in 2023) is generated in sectors that are moderately to highly dependent on nature, a new report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) finds.
The Thematic Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food, and Health—known as the Nexus Report—finds that biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate change are connected crises.
Recognizing and leveraging the connections between biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate change is the way to go about solving the crises, says the report approved at the 11th session of the IPBES Plenary being held in Namibia this week.
IPBES is a global science-policy body providing science evidence to decision-makers for people and nature.
The report, a product of three years of work by 165 leading international experts from 57 countries, finds that existing actions to address these crises fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance.
The front cover of the IPBES Nexus assessment report. Credit: IPBES
Integrated Solutions Needed
Prof. Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the assessment with Prof. Pamela McElwee (USA), highlighted that policymakers should decide and act beyond single-issue silos.
“Our current approaches to dealing with these crises have tended to be fragmented or siloed, and that’s led to inefficiencies and has often been counterproductive,” she says.
“If we try to address climate change, for example, by planting trees, we have to be really aware about what trees we are planting (to ensure they) are not actually making problems for biodiversity,” Harrison says, citing an often-implemented solution to reduce greenhouse gases.
Prof. Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the assessment report. Credit Kiara Worth/IPBES
Prof. Pamela McElwee (USA), co-chair of the assessment report. Credit: Kiara Worth/IPBES
Instead, the report offers response options, actions, or policies that can help advance governance and sustainable management of one or more elements of the nexus.
“What the report also offers is this suite of solutions. It stresses that we have over 70 response options available now that different actors can use in different context-dependent situations.”
The assessment also highlighted the unintended consequences when issues of nature are addressed in isolation.
For example, when the bat population in the United States declined due to a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, farmers increased their use of pesticides. This caused unintended health impacts, with an 8 percent rise in infant mortality reported in affected areas.
However, where a problem is tackled holistically, it can have positive impacts, as in bilharzia, a parasitic disease that affects more than 200 million people worldwide but is especially prevalent in Africa.
“Treated only as a health challenge—usually through medication—the problem often recurs as people are reinfected. An innovative project in rural Senegal took a different approach—reducing water pollution and removing invasive water plants to reduce the habitat for the snails that host the parasitic worms that carry the disease—resulting in a 32 percent reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater, and new revenue for the local communities,” says McElwee.
“The best way to bridge single-issue silos is through integrated and adaptive decision-making. ‘Nexus approaches’ offer policies and actions that are more coherent and coordinated—moving us towards the transformative change needed to meet our development and sustainability goals.”
The High Cost of Inaction
Warning of the high economic costs of inaction and the significant cost of biodiversity loss and climate change impacts, the report highlighted that biodiversity has been the loser in the tradeoffs where short-term gains are implemented and often neglect long-term sustainability.
“Policies informed by Nexus principles can create “win-win” solutions across sectors,” the report says.
According to the report, unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to tackling the multiple crises of biodiversity, water, health, food, and climate change are at least USD 10–25 trillion per year.
McElwee stressed that unaccounted-for costs, alongside direct public subsidies to economic activities worth about USD 1,7 trillion a year, have negative impacts on biodiversity. These subsidies have enhanced annual private sector financial flows estimated at USD 5.3 trillion, which are directly damaging to biodiversity.
“Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for example, could as much as double costs—also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinction,” McElwee warned, emphasizing that delayed action on climate change adds at least USD 500 billion per year in additional costs for meeting policy targets.
The Nexus report, building on previous IPBES reports that identified the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss, states that indirect socioeconomic factors such as increasing waste, overconsumption, and population growth have intensified the direct drivers of biodiversity loss.
“Efforts of governments and other stakeholders have often failed to take into account indirect drivers and their impact on interactions between nexus elements because they remain fragmented, with many institutions working in isolation—often resulting in conflicting objectives, inefficiencies, and negative incentives, leading to unintended consequences,” says Harrison.
The IPBES Nexus assessment has recommended a shift to more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated, and adaptive approaches as a solution to biodiversity loss.
Tapping Opportunities
The Nexus Report recommends a shift from the ‘business as usual’ approach to direct and indirect drivers of change, spelling doom for biodiversity, water quality, and human health. Furthermore, it warns that maximizing the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will result in negative outcomes for other nexus elements.
For example, a ‘food first’ approach prioritizes food production with positive benefits for nutritional health, arising from unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption. But this has negative impacts on biodiversity, water, and climate change.
“Future scenarios do exist that have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co-benefits across the nexus elements,” Harrison says. “The future scenarios with the widest nexus benefits are those with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.”
Noting that current governance structures and approaches are not responsive enough to meet the interconnected challenges from the accelerated speed and scale of environmental change and rising inequalities, the report has recommended a shift to more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated, and adaptive approaches.
The work of IPBES provides the science and evidence to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Paris Agreement on climate change, says Harrison.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), commented that the IPBES Nexus Assessment is the first comprehensive global assessment that looks at the interlinkages between crises and identifies solutions.
“Biodiversity is vital to the efforts to meet humanity’s growing need for food, feed, fiber, and fuel while protecting the planet for future generations,” Andersen says. “We need to produce more with less, through the Four Betters: better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life—leaving no one behind.”
While Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), added that actions to address global challenges affecting biodiversity, water, food, health, and the climate system are often taken without sufficient regard to the interlinkages between them. She says such actions result in shortcomings and adverse impacts on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.
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