Climate fight must enlist biodiversity and communities

It warns that many efforts to mitigate climate change have paid scant attention to biodiversity conservation and the world's poor. Biodiversity has a key role to play in both adapting to the impacts ahead and cutting the concentration of greenhouse gases, but to be effective, policies must have greater input from local communities who are particularly vulnerable to climate change and have valuable local knowledge.

It comes as government parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meet in Rome this week (18-22 February).

“Governments, businesses, donor agencies and individuals need to do more to ensure that the aims of the UN Millennium Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are met,” says Hannah Reid, who wrote the paper with fellow senior researcher Krystyna Swiderska.

“Pro-poor, biodiversity-friendly ways to adapt to and mitigate climate change are clearly the way forward,” says Swiderska. “But … local communities must be involved in decisions about how biodiversity is used. Good governance and fair access to land and resources must be at the heart of these efforts.”

However, bad policies can promote biodiversity loss and even greater impacts on the people most vulnerable to climate change.

Poor people depend heavily on biodiversity for food, medicine, and livelihoods, and the greater the variety of natural resources, the more options they have. Yet climate change threatens many species with extinction and policies aimed at addressing the threat could reduce biodiversity and people's livelihood options.

The paper points out that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations by preserving substantial areas of forest risk excluding local communities from the natural resources on which they depend. Meanwhile, production of biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels has led to widespread conversion of biodiverse forests, savannas and peatlands, causing the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases.

The report concludes that while large projects have political appeal and provide an ‘easy fix', the biodiversity, climate change and poverty benefits of small-scale activities may be many times greater. “Policymakers have focused on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions but biodiversity is also key to adaptation to climate change, particularly as it enhances the resilience of farming systems and other ecosystems,” says Swiderska.