Ensuring Ecosystem Integrity
As acknowledged by the Paris Agreement, maintaining and enhancing the integrity and resilience of ecosystems is critical for the long-term effectiveness of climate mitigation and adaptation actions. Climate actions must be designed to address the systemic nature of the challenges climate change presents, including the nexus between people and ecosystems. Climate action that converts or degrades ecosystems reduces their resilience, which in turn increases vulnerability of people to the impacts of climate change and threatens their lives and livelihoods. For example, the IPCC AR5 identifies possible mitigation actions in the land sector such as large-scale bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, but stresses the uncertainty and high level of risk associated with such actions. This will impact food security, tenure rights, biodiversity, and livelihoods, particularly for those most vulnerable, such as indigenous peoples and local communities. Instead, mitigation measures that prioritize conservation, as well as the sustainable use and restoration of ecosystems, ensuring a rights-based approach, should be incentivized and developed. Such measures should ensure the enhancement of biodiversity and environmental services, while protecting natural ecosystems (including forests), and respecting customary and sustainable land use systems and security of indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ land tenure. Combating climate change through a holistic approach is in our best interest. Not only will we avoid possible ruinous mitigation consequences, ensuring ecosystem integrity as part of a rights-based approach will also greatly aid our adaptation efforts. The more healthy and biodiverse the ecosystem, the more resilient it will be to the impacts of climate change.
Key International Instruments:
Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 14: SDG 14 includes ambitious targets such as preventing and significantly reducing marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities by 2025; and sustainably managing and protecting marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid significant adverse impacts, including by strengthening their resilience by 2020.
Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 15: SDG 15 includes ambitious targets including: ensuring the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of forests, wetlands, mountains and drylands by 2020; and promoting the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halting deforestation, restoring degraded forests, and substantially increasing afforestation and reforestation globally by 2020.
Aichi Biodiversity Targets 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15: Created under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Aichi Targets state ambitious objectives, including:
Target 6 that by 2020 all fish are managed and harvested sustainably, legally, and by applying ecosystem based approaches, so that overfishing is avoided and recovery plans and measures are in place for all depleted species.
Target 8 that by 2020, pollution, including from excess nutrients has been brought to levels that are not detrimental to ecosystem function and biodiversity.
Target 10 that by 2015, the multiple anthropogenic pressures on coral reefs, and other vulnerable ecosystems impacted by climate change or ocean acidification are minimized.
Target 11 that by 2020, at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved.
Target 14 that by 2020, ecosystems that provide essential services, including services related to water, and contribute to health, livelihoods and well-being, are restored and safeguarded, taking into account the needs of women, indigenous and local communities, and the poor and vulnerable.
Target 15 that by 2020, ecosystem resilience and the contribution of biodiversity to carbon stocks has been enhanced, through conservation and restoration, including restoration of at least 15 percent of degraded ecosystems, thus contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation and to combating desertification.
UNFCCC Article 2 states that the ultimate objective of the convention and related legal instruments, such as the Paris Agreement, is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The convention states that that level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change and to ensure that food production is not threatened. That means that climate actions must be designed to address the systemic nature of the challenges climate change presents, including measures to ensure the protection of natural ecosystems.
Paris Agreement: preamble, articles 7.5 and 9: The Paris Agreement tasks countries with ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, and protecting biodiversity when taking action on climate change. This preambular paragraph finds solid footing in article 9 on finance and article 7.5, which states that adaptation action should take communities and ecosystems into consideration.