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The latest report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) adviced countries to address interlinked crises in biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change together for effective remediation.
The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health — known as the Nexus Report — found that existing actions do not tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and impacts effective governance. The document offered decision-makers with some 70 ways to deal with the nexus between biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.
Over the last three years, 165 international experts from 57 countries got together to come up with these suggestions. The report was approved in the 11th session of the IPBES Plenary by delegates from 147 countries.
“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos to better manage, govern and improve the impact of actions in one nexus element on other elements,” said Paula Harrison, senior research scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology who co-chaired the assessment. “The best way to bridge single-issue silos is through integrated and adaptive decision-making,” said Pamela McElwee, associate professor as Rutgers University in the United States, who also chaired the assessment.
A focus on trying to maximise the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will likely result in negative outcomes for the other nexus elements. While efforts to prioritise food production improves nutritional health, it can negatively impact biodiversity, water and climate change, for instance.
Similarly, an exclusive focus on climate change can result in negative outcomes for biodiversity and food, reflecting competition for land.
This report provides the science and evidence needed to support achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Previous IPBES reports such as the Values Assessment Report published in 2022 and the Global Assessment Report published in 2019 had identified the direct drivers of biodiversity loss. These are land and sea use change, unsustainable exploitation, invasive alien species and pollution.
The newest document, the Nexus Report, underscored the indirect drivers that intensify the direct drivers. These include drivers such as increasing waste, overconsumption and population growth.
The researchers found that the 12 assessed indicators across these indirect drivers have all increased or accelerated since 2001. However, these indirect drivers are rarely considered by policy makers as research on these is fragmented. Many institutions work on these in isolation and this leads to conflicting objectives, inefficiencies and negative incentives.
The failure to consider these actions in a synergistic manner has huge economic implications. “Current decision making has prioritized short-term financial returns while ignoring costs to nature and failed to hold actors to account for negative economic pressures on the natural world,” said McElwee.
It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity — reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production — are at least $10-25 trillion per year. Other than this, there are direct public subsidies to economic activities that have negative impacts on biodiversity, amounting to around $1.7 trillion per year. These lead to economic activities that cause direct damage to nature, amounting to around $5.3 trillion per year.
Delaying the action needed to meet policy goals will also increase the costs of delivering it. Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for instance, could as much as double costs.
Delay would also lead to irreplaceable losses such as species extinctions. Similarly, delayed action on climate change could add at least $500 billion per year in additional costs for meeting policy targets.
The report also examined future challenges — assessing 186 different scenarios from 52 separate studies, which project interactions between three or more of the nexus elements, mostly covering the periods up to 2050 and 2100. The assessment suggest that there are responses currently available to manage biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.
The authors presented more than 70 of these ‘response options’ to help manage the nexus elements synergistically, representing 10 broad categories of action.
Some good examples include marine protected areas that have included communities in management and decision-making. These have led to increases in biodiversity, greater abundance of fish to feed people and improved incomes for local communities and often increased tourism revenues as well.
"The IPBES Nexus Assessment is the first comprehensive global assessment that looks at the interlinkages between these crises and identifies solutions. As governments continue work toward achieving commitments made in the Sustainable Development Goals, the Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Paris Agreement, this report comes at a critical moment to support countries achieve our global goals,” said Inger Andersen, executive director, United Nations Environment Programme.
So far, only a summary for policy makers has been released by IPBES. The final full report is expected to be published in 2025.
