WINDHOEK, Namibia – Environmental, social, and economic crises—such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks, and climate change—are all interconnected.
They interact, cascade, and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive.
The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has launched a landmark new report in Windhoek, Namibia.
The Assessment Report 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 maximise co-benefits across five ‘nexus elements’: biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate change.
Approved on Monday, December 16, 2024, 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.
Why is there a need to change tactics
It finds that existing actions to address these challenges fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance.
“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).
The professors gave an example of the health challenge of schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia)—a parasitic disease that can cause lifelong ill health and 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% reduction in infections in children, improved access to fresh water, 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,” said Prof. McElwee.
What are the past and current challenges
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 as a result 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,” the report reads in part.
The report highlights that more than half of global gross domestic product—more than $50 trillion of annual economic activity worldwide—is moderate to highly dependent on nature.
“But current decision-making has prioritised short-term financial returns while ignoring costs to nature and failed to hold actors to account for negative economic pressures on the natural world. It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity—reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health, and climate change, including from food production—are at least $10-25 trillion per year,” said Prof. McElwee.
Unequal Impacts and Need for Inclusive Decision-Making
“Another key message from the report is that the increasingly negative effects of intertwined global crises have very unequal impacts, disproportionately affecting some more than others,” said Prof. Harrison.
More than half of the world’s population lives in areas experiencing the highest impacts from declines in biodiversity, water availability and quality, food security, health risks, and adverse effects of climate change.
These burdens mainly affect developing countries, including small island developing states, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and those in vulnerable situations in higher-income countries.
41% of people live in areas that saw extreme biodiversity declines between 2000 and 2010, 9% in regions that have experienced very high health burdens, and 5% in areas with high levels of malnutrition.
What are the future scenarios according to the IPBES Report
The report also examines future challenges, assessing 186 scenarios from 52 separate studies, which project interactions between three or more nexus elements. The studies mainly cover the periods up to 2050 and 2100.
A key message from this analysis is that if current “business as usual” trends in direct and indirect drivers of change continue, the outcomes will be inferior for biodiversity, water quality, and human health—with worsening climate change and increasing challenges to meet global policy goals.
