GLOBAL ISSUES

 Mother Jones - As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation—without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils. 

A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various UN targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.

The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.

The report centers on biodiversity—that’s the IPBES’s remit, after all—describing how the variety of life on Earth is “essential to our very existence.” But it goes out of its way to show how rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss is both contributing to and being exacerbated by other crises. Climate change, for instance, is making some habitats inhospitable to their erstwhile animal populations, while the loss of those populations can have impacts on freshwater availability and carbon storage. The five interlinking issues were selected by representatives of the 147 IPBES’s member countries.