A new report released on Tuesday has stated that as biodiversity declines at every level, from global to local, and in every region; there are dire impacts on food security and nutrition, water quality and availability, health and well-being outcomes, resilience to climate change and almost all of nature’s other contributions to people.
Launched by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the assessment report on the ‘Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health’ – known as the Nexus Report describes itself as the most ambitious scientific assessment ever undertaken of the complex interconnections.
It explores specific response options to maximise co-benefits across five ‘nexus elements’: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate changes.
The report has been approved by representatives of the 147 governments that are members of IPBES. India is a founding member of the body.
As per the report, existing actions to address these challenges fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance. There is thus a need to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos.
One example of this offered in the report is schistosomiasis (a parasitic disease that infects the urinary tract and intestines) which affects more than 200 million people worldwide – especially in Africa. When treated only as a health challenge and tackled through medication the problem often recurs as people are reinfected.
An innovative project in rural Senegal took a different approach by reducing water pollution and removing invasive water plants to reduce the habitat for the snails that host the parasitic worms that carry the disease. This resulted in a 32% reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater and offered new revenue for the local communities.
The report highlights that more than half of global gross domestic product – over $50 trillion of annual economic activity around the world – is moderately to highly dependent on nature. However, 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 are at least $10-25 trillion per year.
