Take a look at the essential concepts, terms, quotes, or phenomena every day and brush up your knowledge. Here’s your knowledge nugget for today.
(Relevance: UPSC has been asking questions about new environmental protection initiatives launched at the global level. In 2016, a question was asked about the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Therefore, it is important to stay updated on the latest reports released by international organizations. Data from these reports can be used in Mains and Essay writing.)
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a global group of scientific experts, has released an Assessment Report on the Interlinkages among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health – known as the Nexus Report. This is a first-of-a-kind report looking at the interconnections between these multiple crises. The group examined five major challenges — climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, water scarcity, and health risks — and found that they were strongly interconnected.
Key Takeaways:
1. IPBES is to biodiversity and natural ecosystems what the more famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to climate change. It periodically examines all the existing scientific knowledge on biodiversity and nature to make an assessment of their current state.
2. IPBES was set up in 2012 and produced its first report in 2019 in which it assessed the threat to global biodiversity. That report found that as many as one million different species of plants and animals, out of an estimated eight million in total, were facing extinction threats, more than at any previous time, mainly due to the changes in natural ecosystems caused by human activities.
3. The 2019 report stated that nearly 75 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and 66 per cent of marine environments had been “significantly altered”, and over 85 per cent of wetlands had been “lost”. The information in this report became the basis for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework finalised in 2022.
4. The Nexus report highlighted the strong interlinkages between the five identified global challenges. Its key takeaway is that responses to all these challenges need to be harmonised so that positive actions taken on any one of these do not result in negative impacts on others, something that is quite possible, as exemplified in several current approaches.
5. For example, an attempt to scale up food production, a positive action to deal with hunger and malnutrition, could have the unintended consequence of increasing stress on land and water resources and biodiversity.
6. The report argues that it was important to adopt synergistic approaches that deliver benefits across the spectrum. Examples of such response measures included restoration of carbon-rich ecosystems such as forests, soils and mangroves, effective management of biodiversity to reduce risks of diseases spreading from animals to humans, promotion of sustainable healthy diets, and reliance on nature-based solutions wherever possible.
7. The Nexus report emphasised that nature and biodiversity were important not just for ecological and aesthetic reasons but also for purely economic reasons. It pointed out that more than half of the global GDP — about 58 trillion dollars worth of annual economic activity — was moderately to highly dependent on nature. Deterioration of natural ecosystems, therefore, could directly hurt productivity and adversely impact economic output.
8. The key message of the Nexus report is that if the current trend of tackling climate change continues, the outcomes will be extremely poor for biodiversity, water quality, and human health. Similarly, focusing on maximising the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will likely result in negative outcomes for the other nexus elements.
Key statistics from the Nexus Report
📍The Nexus report finds that there has been a 2-6 percent biodiversity decline per decade across all assessed indicators for the last 30-50 years.
📍More than 50 per cent of the world’s population is living 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.
📍More than 50 per cent of global GDP (approximately $58 trillion), as per 2023 valuation, are moderately to highly dependent on nature.
📍There is an estimated $ 1 trillion annual financing gap to meet global resource needs for biodiversity.
BEYOND THE NUGGET: Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
1. The KM-GBF was adopted in 2022 at the 15th meeting under the Convention on Biological Diversity and 196 countries agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 to achieve a nature-positive world.
2. It provided a set of four goals and 23 targets which is commonly referred to as the 30×30 target: a commitment to protect at least 30 per cent of the world’s lands, oceans and coastal areas by 2030. A related commitment is to ensure that restoration activities would be started on at least 30 per cent of degraded land or marine ecosystems by 2030.
3. The overall goal is to ensure that all natural ecosystems are either maintained, enhanced or restored “substantially”, with an overall increase in the area of natural ecosystems by 2050. Another goal is to ensure a ten-fold reduction in extinction rate of species — currently estimated to be tens to hundreds of times higher than the average of the last 10 million years.
4. India has submitted its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) spelling out its 23 national biodiversity targets during the annual United Nations conference on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia that concluded last month.
(Source: With 23 national targets, India submits biodiversity protection plan to global body, Climate change and biodiversity loss are connected: Key takeaways from NEXUS report )
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