A new report, published by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has shown that environmental, social and economic crises – such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks and climate change – are all interconnected.
The Report, which also focused 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.
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“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.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
