CLIMATE CHANGE AND BIODIVERSITY.

To many, the term “climate change” feels like a buzzword that encompasses a large amount of negative impacts (which it recently is), First, climate means the average weather conditions in an area over a long period of time—usually 30 years or longer. A region’s climate includes systems in the air, water, land and living organisms. Climate change is the shift or abnormal variation to the climate patterns. As the planet warms quickly, mostly due to human activity, climate patterns in regions around the world will fluctuate. Ecosystems and biodiversity will be forced to fluctuate along with the regional climate, and that could harm many species.

These climate change impacts are in part due to how we have altered land use. Turning natural areas into cities or agricultural fields not only diminishes biodiversity, but can make warming worse by chopping down trees and plants that help cool the planet. A change in climate also intensifies droughts, decrease water supply, threaten food security, erode and inundate coastlines, and weaken natural resilience infrastructure that humans depend on.

To throw some light, biodiversity is the foundation of ecosystem services to which human well being is intimately linked. It is the variability among living organisms from all sources, including terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems. Typically, Biodiversity forms the foundation of the vast array of ecosystem services that critically contribute to human well being.

  More formally, biodiversity is comprised of several levels, starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment. These myriad interactions have made Earth habitable for billions of years.

 No feature of Earth is more complex, dynamic, and varied than the layer of living organisms that occupy its surfaces and its seas, and no feature is experiencing more dramatic change at the hands of humans than this extraordinary, singularly unique feature of Earth. This layer of living organisms (the biosphere) through the collective metabolic activities of its innumerable plants, animals, and microbes physically and chemically unites the atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere into one environmental system within which millions of species, including humans, have thrived. Breathable air, potable water, fertile soils, productive lands, bountiful seas, the equitable climate of Earth’s recent history, and other ecosystem services are manifestations of the workings of life. It follows that large-scale human influences over this biota have tremendous impacts on human well-being. It also follows that the nature of these impacts, good or bad, is within the power of humans to influence.

If we have the power therefore to influence these impacts and maintain biodiversity as a climate mitigation process, we have to be alive to the Aichi Biodiversity targets that lay down a set of 20 global targets under strategic plan for biodiversity 2011-2020.

These targets are grouped under 5 strategic goals. Strategic goal 4 provides for enhancement of the benefits to all from biodiversity and ecosystem service. Target 15 falls under Strategic goal 4 and it provides that, by 2020, ecosystem resilience and the contribution of biodiversity to carbon stocks must have been enhanced, through conservation and restoration, including restoration of at least 15 per cent of degraded ecosystems, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation and to combating desertification.

The achievement of biodiversity protection and restoration however is not a one man responsibility, it requires participation at all levels to foster the full and effective contributions of all people, indigenous and local communities, civil-society organisations, the private sector and stakeholders from all sectors, and development of national and regional targets, using the Strategic Plan and its Aichi targets as a flexible framework.

Earth’s life has evolved over 550 million years. Along the way, five mass extinction events have caused serious setbacks to life on our planet. The fifth, which was caused by a gargantuan meteorite impact along Mexico’s Yucatan coast, changed Earth’s climate, took out the dinosaurs and altered the course of biological evolution. Today nature is suffering accelerating losses so great that many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is underway. Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth’s climate.

 The Paris Agreement does not safeguard the diversity of life on Earth. Without a companion plan, we will lose the wealth of species that have taken millions of years to evolve and accumulate. In fact, the Paris Agreement cannot be met without simultaneously saving biodiversity. On this note therefore, a combination of all our efforts and actions can save us from the sixth mass extinction. LET’S ACT