Biodiversity and climate crisis

There is much to say on such a broad subject. What matters most is providing the conceptual tools to understand the mechanisms behind the environmental crisis we are experiencing and the means at our disposal to reduce and navigate it. These talks adopt a systemic approach to explain the intertwining of climate and ecological challenges. Climate disruption is one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss, and biodiversity is one of the primary regulators of the climate. The fight against climate change cannot succeed without the preservation and restoration of ecosystems. In turn, this restoration also helps limit the causes of global warming and contributes to improving the quality of life and well-being of human societies. There is therefore a welcome and timely convergence between the problems we face and the solutions available to us.

These talks invite audiences to become aware of the scale of our impacts on biodiversity and the climate. They also present the resilience capacities of living beings, which have shown on many occasions that they can respond positively and rapidly when given the necessary space and time — far more so than we might sometimes have imagined.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has categorised the impacts of human activities on biodiversity into five main drivers: land and ocean use change, manifested through construction and agriculture; climate disruption; the direct exploitation of species through hunting, fishing, and so on; various forms of pollution; and invasive alien species. These pressure factors are responsible for the vast majority of species extinctions that have been observed and recorded, for the fragmentation and degradation of habitats that cause them, and for the reduction in the size of wild species populations and their genetic diversity. The changes do not stop there. The Earth’s major biogeochemical cycles are being altered — most alarmingly the water cycle, but also the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, driven in particular by intensive agricultural practices. Amid the uncertainty of global change, we know that species have biological tools at their disposal to adapt. However, the speed and intensity of these changes may not leave sufficient room for such adaptation. We are therefore engaged in a race against time, in which understanding the role of societies and individuals is crucial.