A new report launched by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has said that environmental, social and economic crises – such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks and climate change – are all interconnected.
They interact, cascade and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive.
The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health – known as the Nexus Report – offers decision-makers around the world the most ambitious scientific assessment ever undertaken of these complex interconnections and explores more than five dozen specific response options to maximize co-benefits across five ‘nexus elements’: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.
Approved by the 11th session of the IPBES Plenary, composed of representatives of the 147 Governments that are members of IPBES, the report is the product of three years of work by 165 leading international experts from 57 countries from all regions of the world. It finds that existing actions to address these challenges fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance.
“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos to manage better, govern and improve the impact of actions in one nexus element on other elements,” said Prof Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the Assessment with Prof Pamela McElwee (USA). “Take for example the health challenge of schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia) – a parasitic disease that can cause life-long ill health and which affects more than 200 million people worldwide – especially 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 per cent reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater and new revenue for the local communities.”
“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,” McElwee said.
The report states that biodiversity – the richness and variety of all life on Earth – is declining at every level from global to local, and across every region. These ongoing declines in nature, largely because of human activity, including climate change, have direct and dire impacts on food security and nutrition, water quality and availability, health and wellbeing outcomes, resilience to climate change and almost all of nature’s other contributions to people.
Building on previous IPBES reports, in particular the 2022 Values Assessment Report and the 2019 Global Assessment Report, which identified the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss, including land- and sea-use change, unsustainable exploitation, invasive alien species and pollution, the Nexus Report further underscores how indirect socioeconomic drivers, such as increasing waste, overconsumption and population growth, intensify the direct drivers – worsening impacts on all parts of the nexus. The majority of 12 indicators assessed across these indirect drivers – such as GDP, population levels and overall food supply, have all increased or accelerated since 2001.
“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,” according to Harrison.
The report highlights that more than half of global gross domestic product – more than $50 trillion of annual economic activity worldwide – is moderately to highly dependent on nature. “But 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. 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,” McElwee said.
The existence of such unaccounted-for costs, alongside direct public subsidies to economic activities that have negative impacts on biodiversity (approximately $1.7 trillion per year), enhances private financial incentives to invest in economic activities that cause direct damage to nature (approximately $5.3 trillion per year), in spite of growing evidence of biophysical risks to economic progress and financial stability.
Delaying the action needed to meet policy goals will also increase the costs of delivering it. Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for example, could as much as double costs – also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinctions. Delayed action on climate change adds at least $500 billion yearly in additional costs for meeting policy targets.
“Another key message from the report is that the increasingly negative effects of intertwined global crises have very unequal impacts, disproportionately affecting some more than others,” Harrison said.
More than half of the world’s population lives in areas experiencing the highest impacts from declines in biodiversity, water availability and quality and food security, and increases in health risks and negative effects of climate change. These burdens especially affect developing countries, including small island developing states, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as those in vulnerable situations in higher-income countries. 41 per cent of people live in areas that saw extreme declines in biodiversity between 2000 and 2010, 9 per cent in regions that have experienced very high health burdens and 5 per cent in areas with high levels of malnutrition.
Some efforts – such as research and innovation, education and environmental regulations – have been partially successful in improving trends across nexus elements. Still, the report finds these are unlikely to succeed without addressing interlinkages more fully and tackling indirect drivers like trade and consumption. More inclusive decision-making, with a particular focus on equity, can help ensure those most affected are included in solutions, in addition to larger economic and financial reforms.
The report also examines 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.
A key message from this analysis is that if current “business as usual” trends in direct and indirect drivers of change continue, the outcomes will be extremely poor for biodiversity, water quality and human health – with worsening climate change and increasing challenges to meet global policy goals.
Similarly, focusing on trying to maximise the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will likely result in negative outcomes for the other elements. For example, a ‘food first’ approach prioritizes food production with positive benefits on nutritional health, arising from unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption. This has negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.
An exclusive focus on climate change can result in negative outcomes for biodiversity and food, reflecting competition for land. Weak environmental regulation, made worse by delays, results in worsening impacts on biodiversity, food, human health and climate change.
“Future scenarios do exist that have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co-benefits across the nexus elements,” said Prof Harrison. “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.”
An important aim of IPBES work is to provide the science and evidence needed to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Nexus Report shows that scenarios focusing on synergies among biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change have the best likely outcomes for the SDGs – and that focusing on addressing the challenges in just one sector – such as food, biodiversity or climate change in isolation – seriously limits the chances of meeting other goals.
The report shows a significant number of responses – on a policy, political and community level – currently available to sustainably manage across biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change, some of which are also low cost.
The authors present more than 70 of these ‘response options’ to help manage the nexus elements synergistically, representing 10 broad action categories. Examples of these response options that have broadly positive impacts across nexus elements are: restoring carbon-rich ecosystems such as forests, soils, and mangroves; managing biodiversity to reduce the risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans; improving integrated landscape and seascape management; urban nature-based solutions; sustainable healthy diets; and supporting Indigenous food systems.
The more than 70 response options presented in the report, taken together, support the achievement of all 17 SDGs, all 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the long-term goals for climate change mitigation and adaptation of the Paris Agreement. Twenty-four of the response options advance more than five SDGs and more than five of the Global Biodiversity Framework targets.
Implementing response options together or in sequence can further improve their positive impacts and achieve cost savings. Ensuring inclusive participation, such as including Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the co-design, governance and implementation of response options, can also increase the benefits and equity of these measures.
“Some good examples include marine protected areas that have included communities in management and decision-making,” McElwee said. “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.”
Speaking about what will be needed to advance effective responses, policies and actions, McElwee said: “Our current governance structures and approaches are not responsive enough to meet the interconnected challenges that result from the accelerated speed and scale of environmental change and rising inequalities.
“Fragmented and siloed institutions, as well as short-term, contradictory and non-inclusive policies have significant potential to put the achievement of the global development and sustainability targets at risk. This can be addressed by moving towards ‘nexus governance approaches’: more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated and adaptive approaches.”
