Biodiversity, a key ally in the fight against climate change
The climate change crisis, with the collapse of biodiversity as a backdrop, represents a colossal challenge that nature's solutions can help us meet.
Climate change poses a growing threat to biological diversity. Rising temperatures, greater occurrence of extreme weather events and increasing ocean acidification, to name but a few, are putting additional pressure on ecosystems already weakened by human activities.
Yet biodiversity and climate change are often treated as two distinct phenomena that evolve in isolation from each other. This division is reflected in the international summits, the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), which address these issues separately. COP29, which focuses on climate change, is currently taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan.
COP29 is the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is within the framework of the COPs that the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015), for example, were adopted. The COPs have three components: climate change, biodiversity and desertification. They all have their origins in the third Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
And yet, one crisis cannot exist without the other; they reinforce each other. In this context, natural solutions are an avenue that is gaining increasing interest from both the scientific community and decision-makers.
Nature's solutions for the future
Around half of man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions remain in the atmosphere, with soils and oceans absorbing the rest. These ecosystems and the biodiversity they host play a key role as carbon sinks. The longer they remain intact, the greater their capacity to mitigate environmental impacts.
Nature-based solutions, or nature solutions, are part of this context. They refer to a broad set of actions and policies that use natural processes to combat and adapt to climate change, notably through the restoration, conservation and management of ecosystems. This type of initiative makes it possible to consider the climate change and biodiversity crises as a single whole, and to tackle them head on.
In such an approach, humans become players involved in the protection and restoration of ecosystems, and in the process, prime beneficiaries.
In recent years, much attention has been focused on tree planting (as reflected in Canada's commitments to plant two billion trees over 10 years), but nature-based solutions encompass a much wider range of possibilities. For example, shoreline revegetation can contribute to climate change adaptation by protecting coastal communities from flooding and erosion, while enhancing carbon sequestration. Restoring wetlands also helps to absorb excess water during periods of heavy rainfall and filter pollutants, thereby limiting the risk of flooding and improving water quality, while serving as a habitat for wildlife. In the same vein, the presence of vegetation in urban environments can contribute to rainwater management, while reducing the effects of heat islands and atmospheric pollution.
At Habitat, we're convinced that the climate transition can and must be accelerated by implementing nature-based solutions. Contact us to find out more about how Habitat can help you reconcile biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation.
The next decade will be decisive in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Natural solutions open the door to a more holistic approach based on the territory and the needs of communities.