Climate and Biodiversity Interdependence

Climate and Biodiversity Interdependence

• A functional natural system alongside a habitable climate serves as the foundation for human well-being
• Protecting biodiversity, preventing risky climate change, and ensuring a fair quality of life are mandates of global initiatives
• Key initiatives include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Biodiversity decline, climate change, and human well-being are closely related challenges
• Failure to address climate change and biodiversity decline jointly risks compromising human well-being

Biodiversity and Climate Intertwining

• IPBES- IPCC workshop report examines the connection between biodiversity and climate and their effects on quality of life
• Climate and biodiversity policies must be jointly considered to achieve a good quality of life
• Life depends on a climate that has remained within narrow bounds for millions of years
• Past climate variability has influenced contemporary biodiversity via species redistribution, extinctions, and originations
• Global biodiversity has generally increased, but mass extinctions are linked to large or fast climate changes

Historical Climate and Biodiversity

• Ancient global catastrophes triggered evolutionary and ecological novelty
• Modern Neotropical rainforests assembled after the Cretaceous mass extinction
• In the last 12,000 years, global mean temperatures (GMT) ranged between +0.7 and -1°C relative to the late 19th century
• The stable climate in the last 12,000 years was a precondition for the growth of human civilizations
• Current GMT is nearing the upper limit of the past 1.2 million years, exceeding the range since agriculture began

Human Impact and Earth Systems

• Living organisms are essential to the Earth system, regulating local, regional, and global climate
• Biodiversity, climate and human activities are interconnected
• Human actions like land/sea use change and burning fossil fuels drive biodiversity loss and climate change
• Climate change and biodiversity loss are driven by indirect drivers that are based on societal values
• Biodiversity conservation strategies should consider climate change, and climate change mitigation should consider biodiversity impacts

Addressing Climate and Biodiversity Crises

• Natural processes and biodiversity influence the capacity to adapt to climate change
• Efforts to stop biodiversity loss typically benefit the climate
• Addressing biodiversity loss and climate change requires navigating a complex system to enable a good quality of life
• Mitigation affects biodiversity, conservation occurs within climate change contexts and biodiversity promotes adaptation and adaptive capacity

Biodiversity's Influence on Climate

• Living organisms stabilize the climate by regulating land reflectivity and greenhouse gases
• They also facilitate cloud formation and influence atmospheric dust
• Living organisms play a central role in the global carbon cycle and in the dynamics of major greenhouse gases
• Diatom species richness affects carbon sequestration in seafloor sediments

Human Manipulation of Nature

• Humans have transformed nature to adapt to environmental conditions
• Resulting technological advances have increased living standards but at the cost of increasing energy and material consumption and economic inequalities
• Use and transformation of ecosystems, exploitation, pollution, and invasive species cause biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation
• Increased greenhouse gas emissions have altered atmospheric composition and impacted the climate system, influencing global temperatures, precipitation, and extreme weather

Consequences of Environmental Change

• Climatic changes exacerbate biodiversity decline, impacting the climate further
• Less than a quarter of Earth's land and 13% of the ocean are free from significant human impact
• Humans and livestock comprise 96% of Earth's mammal biomass, with poultry biomass exceeding wild birds
• Human activities account for 83% reduction in wild mammal biomass and 50% reduction in plant biomass
• Terrestrial vertebrates extinction rates are up to 100 times higher than background levels

Climate Change and Species

• Species are now more threatened with extinction
• Climate change causes geographic range shifts in species and changes species phenology and migration patterns
• Climate change also disrupts ecological interactions
• Biodiversity decline and climate changes share drivers, interact, and have cascading effects, impacting quality of life and societal goals

Drivers of Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

• Direct drivers of climate change: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change
• Direct drivers of biodiversity decline: land/sea use intensity, direct exploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species
• Some drivers like deforestation and pollution strongly impact both; others primarily affect one such as invasive species affecting biodiversity decline

Underlying Causes and Interactions

• Indirect drivers are distant causes, shaped by societal values
• Climate change and biodiversity decline have shared indirect drivers
• Indirect drivers include institutional, governance, social, economic, and cultural contexts that determine human behavior
• These drivers operate across global, national, regional, and local scales
• Consumption of materials and energy drive a rise in climate change and biodiversity decline

Impacts on Good Quality of Life

• Climate change and biodiversity loss impact quality of life, affect economies, and degrade Earth's surface
• Degradation of land impacts the quality of life for at least 3.2 billion people worldwide
• Biodiversity decline impacts public health and exacerbates inequalities such as access to healthy diets
• Climate change affects food production, food security, access, utilization, and price stability

Climate Change Disruption and Health

• Climate extremes disrupt food and water supply, damage infrastructure, and reduce air quality
• Marginalized people are disproportionately affected
• The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the relationship between human health, biodiversity, and climate change
• Disrupted ecosystems and wildlife trade bring wildlife, such as bats, into closer proximity with humans and domestic animals, increasing disease risk

Habitat Loss and Climate Amplification

• Habitat loss from climate change contributes to the proximity of wildlife and humans and amplification during the COVID-19 pandemic with floods, heat waves, wildfires, and food insecurity
• Protecting nature and ensuring a stable climate is important
• Failure to integrate the underlying causes of climate change and biodiversity decline reduces optimal solutions
• Mitigation measures such as monoculture tree planting can harm native species diversity
• Conservation measures must consider future climate scenarios to conserve biodiversity and to mitigate climate change

Climate Change as a Dominant Threat

• Climate change has emerged as a dominant threat to ecosystems
• Climate change impacts occur via altering species ranges and abundances, reshuffling communities, food webs, ecosystem functions, and quality of life
• Species near their thermal limits and coral reefs, lakes, and wetlands are particularly at risk
• Warm-water coral reefs are at high risk under present conditions (1°C warming)
• Kelp forests and seagrasses reach high risk under modest future warming (RCP 2.6)

Future Climate Change Risks

• Most other shallow ocean ecosystems experience moderate risk
• Under high future warming (RCP 8.5), all ocean ecosystems will be at high risk
• Many species are responding to climatic changes via shifts in elevation, depth, and latitude
• Redistribution leads to reduced marine species richness in equatorial latitudes
• Barriers to dispersal and species' ability to track climate lead to compositional shifts

Taxonomic Diversity and Community Changes

• Changes are decreasing taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity, reorganizing communities with potentially novel communities created
• Not many species extinctions have been attributed to climate change
• Rapid climate change can cause mass extinctions, capable of wiping out up to 90% of all species which raises concerns about adaptive potential

Consequences of Global Warming

• Under a 1.5°C warming scenario, Insects, plants and vertebrates are projected to lose over half of their climates
• At 2°C the insects, plants and vertebrates are projected to lose more of their habitats
• At 3.2°C warming above pre industrial levels there will be a loss of more than half of the historical geographic range for insects, plants and vertebrates

Disruptions from Climate Change

• Under scenarios an abrubt ecological structure, function and services, is expected in tropical marine systems
• Climate change and anthropogenic drivers vary in impact geographically
• Marine and freshwater ectothermic organisms appear more prone to warming than terrestrial ones
• Biodiversity decline appears stronger but variable in the ocean

Impacts on Species Richness

• Magnitude and direction of change depends on the scale
• Species richness declines locally but increases regionally for some
• Some species stay the same locally but decline on larger scales such as Central American corals
• Even with environmental changes at local scales, taxonomic and functional homogenization of communities occurs

Anthropogenic Drivers of Biodiversity

• The resilience of ecosystems can decrease due to the impairing of their function
• Anthropogenic drivers tend to spatially overlap more often in terrestrial systems than marine systems
• Direct human impacts drive species decline near human settlements

Biodiversity Loss

• Climate change dominates biodiversity loss in less human impacted areas (deserts, boreal forests)
• Climate change and anthropogenic drivers combined drive biodiversity loss in systems with high fishing and climate change
• Drivers interact to produce synergistic, antagonistic outcomes
• Multiple drivers can highly impact functioning

Climate Change and Ecosystems

• Climate change can cause abrupt shifts when ecosystems pass critical thresholds
• Declining snowfields reduce late-summer streamflow, impacting biodiversity
• Ocean warming reduces coral fitness, degrading reef ecosystems
• Deforestation and droughts promote fires, replacing forests with savanna-type vegetation

Factors that are Difficult to Predict

• Critical thresholds/tipping points are highly unpredictable
• Changes in species composition influence biophysical processes and climate cycles
• The northward shift of Arctic coniferous trees reduces surface reflection, amplifying warming

Biodiversity and Adaptation

• Biodiversity enhances adaptation to adverse climate changes and mitigates impacts
• Species diversity can act as an insurance against declines in ecosystem functioning
• Diverse communities respond better to climate variability and extremes

Stability of Ecosystems

• Greater biodiversity facilitates ecosystem integrity, maintaining function and structure
• There are limits to the adaptive capacity of biological communities
• Conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change is required to ensure functions and people contributions
• Biophysical impacts distances
• Human and natural connections are increasingly connected from one place in the world from various sources

Global Challenges and Governance

• Links are stronger than before due to economic and biophysical processes through geographies
• Telecoupling provides opportunities for biodiversity and climate change
• They have causes and impact of origin from 'distant supermarket, corporation boardroom, stock markets' are unprecedented
• Several global initiatives have a mandate to address biodiversity conservation, climate action and equitable sustainable development

Global Plans

• Strategic Plan for Biodiversity helped aim to safeguard biodiversity on land and in the ocean
• The Paris Agreement looks to strengthen global climate response with limiting temperature and adaption measures
• The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aims to achieve global challenges, equality though achievements
• Knowing national polices can be co-detrimental and benefitial
• It's crucial that action and policies are aware of impacts and synergies

Combatting Climate Change

• Actions to combat climate change can unintentionally be harmful to biodiversity
• Measures to protect biodiversity can impair climate mitigation
• Addressing climate change can become counterproductive if it creates biodiversity decline
• Implementing appropriate policies addresses climate change, biodiversity and good quality of life

Societal Connection

• Social connections impact the nexus on climate-biodiversity-society
• Vulnerability in areas of nature impact climate change and biodiversity decline
• Climate change and biodiversity loss can further inequalities
• Lack of clear understanding of how social issues can be affected by mitigating climate change

Implication Effectiveness

• Linkages has benefits that come from climate solutions on a local level
• Policies can benefit social equity as well as impacts from mitigating climate changes
• Understanding societal trade offs can help make policies can create for a more equitable future

Promoting Success

• Policies requires incentives and governance
• Climate and biodiversity policies account for human-natural systems
• Changes linked to climate, habitat loss and overexploitation all impact biodiversity on levels
• Altering human action and behaviors generate cascading effects that iteratively have a feedback to human like

Distribution Telecoupling

• Uneven biodiversity distribution can can lead to large exchanges and reinforce inequality
• Strategies with land deals can impact developing countries
• Sustainable futures requires integration from technical, governance, financial and other aspects

Mitigating Damage

• Damage is closing, thus solutions are needed that use; nature, technology.
• The solutions that protect ecosystems and help with human needs
• New model can that integrates governance and measures human progress
• UN processes often overlook potential role of organizations which increases participation

Holding Parties Accountable

• Need to grow the role of corporations in driving to address connected challenges
• Targeting all actors across space and making them accountable
• New level of coordination and balance

Achieving Climate-Ecosystem Goals

• Enable change toward future trade offs
• Critical towards trade offs
• Transforming social issues needs effort

Limited Opportunity

• Covid-19 offers opportunity for limited time
• Lock downs helped in serving the community and emissions
• Easy to divert attention from the challenges
• International plans have been delayed by the climate

Mainstreaming Biodiversity and Ecosystem

• Solutions will allow for green and blue growth, mainstraiming the community and biodiversity
• Life is on Earth is heavily linked
• Plants and animals are connected by carbon
• Critical carbon effects

Carbon and Climate

• Plants and algael process
• Some animal use structures
• They can also benefit from high concentration of some species
• Human effects that are affected by people such as food affect humans when affect the plants
• Physiological limits are a constraint

Migration Patterns

• Can only adapt or move
• Movements are very varied
• Management is different at points of the life stage
• There should be connections across air and other social aspects