WOTR’s Position Paper on “Biodiversity and adaptation to climate change” released on October 16, 2012 at the COP-11 in Hyderabad

There are various drivers of degradation that are adversely impacting the ecosystems and in turn affecting ecosystem services.  Ironically, the growth economy and unsustainable policies are leading to erosion of the very base – biodiversity and ecosystems. 

Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA) is an emerging approach that works with nature to help vulnerable communities build the resilience of their ecosystems and livelihoods that are being threatened by climate change impacts. This approach expects to generate significant multiple benefits social, economic and cultural.

Biodiversity is key to how well people can adapt to climate change. The poor, the marginalised and the women need to be involved in planning and decision-making so that they may derive sustainable livelihoods from these resources. We need to set different directions for policy, alter incentive structures, reduce or phase out subsidies (that promote wanton degradation of ecosystem services). There is need to establish environmental limits to ensure that society remains within them in order to grow sustainability.

In the section “Biodiversity is a solution that itself faces major threat” the report asserts that “there is a need to develop policy for climate change adaptation and mitigation, in which the requirements to perform Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) and Systems Analysis as needed, as well as the need to consider ecosystems-based landscape planning where appropriate should be recommended”.

The report argues for the need to place biodiversity as a fundamental unit of the economy. It says that the crisis of biodiversity loss can only be addressed in earnest if the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services are fully recognized and represented in decision-making.

Image courtesy: WOTR

The ecosystems play an essential role in enhancing food security. Ecosystems supply the fundamental foundation of life support, by providing ecosystem services that enable us to produce or utilize food and water. They also provide clean air and climate regulation, shelter and medicines, cultural and aesthetic wellbeing, and can have a vital role in disaster risk reduction. These ecosystem services are however under increasing pressure and threat of further degradation.

As climate change and other pressures bring to bear increasing stresses, we need to ensure that ecosystems do not degrade. Instead we must ensure that they remain healthy and fully functional in order to provide the vital ecosystem services we rely on. We should therefore seek to protect, restore and better improve ecosystems, particularly those that have been most degraded.

Given this vital role that ecosystems play in sustaining a growing human society, their current rate of degradation and the emerging threats of climate change, the existing approaches to integrating environmental concerns with economic policy development will be not be sufficient by themselves to tackle the problems we face.

Instead, whilst the ecosystem-based adaptation approach is not a panacea for all problems, it is one that when integrated with other strategies working towards the same goals (climate regulation, poverty alleviation and sustainability), forms the foundation for a successful integrated strategy for food, water and ultimately food security.

Ecosystem management acknowledges the importance of human needs while at the same time confronting the reality that the capacity of our world to meet those needs in perpetuity has limits and depends on the functioning of ecosystems.