Biodiversity needs same protection as climate, say scientists, activists at COP27

Civil society groups, Indigenous activists and scientists are standing together at the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and demanding firm action be taken next month at the UN Biodiversity Conference that will be hosted in Montreal.

The conference aims to get governments to agree on a framework to "bring about a transformation in society's relationship with biodiversity," which is in rapid decline worldwide due to climate change and other factors.

The moment is seen as critical for biodiversity loss, as the world warms to a level that could soon trigger tipping points in the natural world that could have cascading and catastrophic effects not yet fully understood, but which experts say would be, in all likelihood, irreversible.

"The climate and biodiversity crises are deeply interconnected and must be addressed simultaneously," said Lucy Almond, chair of the Nature 4 Climate Coalition, a united group of 20 organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute, dedicated to elevating nature as a climate solution.

"In three weeks' time, ministers will arrive in Montreal for the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP15, with the aim of giving biodiversity and ecosystems the same international protection as climate," Almond said.

She called it a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create an international agreement that will actually set out to tackle both crises together.

The key architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement — Christiana Figueres, Laurence Tubiana, Laurent Fabius and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal — have added their voices to the calls for the Montreal-based conference to create a sister agreement to that document to address biodiversity losses.

Currently, the planet is seen to be on the brink of the sixth mass extinction event, the first one triggered by humans, with approximately one million species already at risk of extinction.

Biodiversity loss is happening because of habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation and other reasons — and is forecast to accelerate because of the destabilizing effects climate change is having on planetary systems.

Research published this year in the journal Science found that if the planet exceeds 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels, that could begin triggering irreversible effects around the planet, called tipping points.

As the name suggestions, a tipping point isn't a gradual change as the temperature increases, like a slowly melting glacier. Rather, the researchers forecast that at certain thresholds, the Greenland ice sheet is likely to collapse, coral reefs will rapidly die off, and so on. Scientists have identified 16 of these systems that are responsible for maintaining the planet's natural equilibrium, but those systems are destabilizing as the planet warms.

"The risk of tipping points — the science has highlighted that for a long time — but sometimes in COP negotiations, people don't talk much about the risks," said Carlos Nobre, an Earth system scientist from Brazil's University of São Paulo.

As examples, he noted how loss of tropical forests would trigger the release of enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, warming the planet further and setting off a nasty feedback loop. A similar dynamic exists as permafrost thaws in the Arctic, he added.

"So we have to avoid those tipping points. Otherwise, in the 22nd century, the temperature will be without control," Nobre said Wednesday.