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October 19, 2022
The 27th U.N. climate summit (COP27), taking place in Egypt in November 2022, will be the first meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to dedicate a day specifically to biodiversity. While climate change and biodiversity loss are inherently intertwined, the issues have all too often been kept separate when it comes to developing policies and solutions. Biodiversity Day provides an opportunity to break down these silos to elevate “where biodiversity has been managed in the face of climate change, and where the management of biodiversity through conservation, land restoration, combating desertification, and sustainable use has led to benefits for climate mitigation and adaptation,” as described on the COP27 Presidency website.
The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 led to the creation of three United Nations conventions—the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since then, the UNFCCC has been meeting every year and the Biodiversity Convention has been meeting every other year to coordinate international collaboration and responses. This year, in part because of pandemic delays, the UNFCCC’s COP27 and the Biodiversity Convention’s COP15 are taking place in quick succession—November and December respectively. This juxtaposition provides even more impetus to build clearer and stronger alignment between climate and biodiversity work, especially since COP15 is expected to deliver a Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework—an opportunity to include a stronger climate perspective.
Groups like the World Climate Foundation, a Denmark-based organization that brings decisionmakers together to advance climate solutions, have set out to further this alignment by hosting a three-part World Biodiversity Summit during New York Climate Week, COP27, and COP15. The first part of the summit in September 2022 at New York Climate Week brought together the private and public sectors to share opportunities to prioritize biodiversity.
“People are coming to recognize how important biodiversity is, and there is a real recognition of how we can tackle these twin crises at the same time through nature-based solutions and natural climate solutions,” said Ellie Taylor, project coordinator at the World Climate Foundation. “The first part of the World Biodiversity Summit was very action-oriented and focused on solutions. The summit had an emphasis on COP15 with every party calling for it to be a ‘Paris Agreement moment for nature.’ A lot of different sectors are aligned on key issues.”
Looking ahead, the World Climate Foundation plans for the World Biodiversity Summit to emphasize the affordability and reliability of nature-based solutions, the need to accelerate investments in nature, and opportunities to engage a diverse range of stakeholders in this work—especially from the Global South. For the private sector, the World Climate Foundation is focused on demonstrating how supply and value chains are impacted by biodiversity loss and climate change. For governments, the summit aims to generate conversation on how to take climate action without having negative impacts on biodiversity.
For example, Bardha Kushutani von Kappelgaard, project director at the World Climate Foundation, noted that “with many governments and the private sector, we are dealing a lot with biodiversity and energy and how the renewable energy pathways affect biodiversity. We know there are a lot of industries out there [that] are impacting biodiversity and a lot of them are only now getting into the discussion on biodiversity.”
In the United States, similar work is also underway. American Forests, a U.S.-based nonprofit, works with private and public sector partners to carry out projects with landowners at the intersection of climate adaptation science and biodiversity recovery. Most of the projects that American Forests implements provide carbon sequestration benefits and biodiversity conservation. If distributed effectively, funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (P.L.117-58) for U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Forest Service re-vegetation programs and for the Reforestation Trust Fund are set to bolster work like this, which is key for these new laws to deliver on their full potential.
“We can be reducing emissions, but if we are not paying attention to the degradation of ecosystems over time, then those natural systems and their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere will lose that capacity over time or at least it will shift and become less reliable. And potentially we will see more emissions from our forests, which is of great concern,” explains Brian Kittler, American Forests vice president of forest restoration.
Having all the right stakeholders involved is key to advancing biodiversity and climate goals together. This often means working in close partnership with tribal communities. Kittler explained that American Forests is working to integrate cultural values into making landscapes resilient. “For landscape resilience projects post-fire, we are mindful about where the tribes that we are working with would ideally like to have trees planted and where they would not like to have trees planted,” he said. “In some places, they may want to either maintain the good work that fire did or do ecological restoration around meadows or other specific living cultural resources.”
In the United States and around the world, the intersection of biodiversity and climate change is likely to see increased attention in the coming months—highlighting the need for more robust policy and increased funding. At the international level, there is a window of opportunity to specifically link the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to the Paris Agreement. With the planned attention to biodiversity at COP27, the strengthening of the biodiversity-climate interconnection could represent a significant step forward for international environmental governance.
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Author: Anna McGinn
Contributor: Nick Solis
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