Sustainable development, human well-being linked to state of biodiversity

Climate change will have a profound impact on human and natural systems. It will affect species, habitats, ecosystem functioning as well as lives and livelihoods. It will impede economic growth and jeopardise achievement of the sustainable development goals.

The Sixth Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that climate change in the recent few decades has resulted in an unprecedented rise in global average land and ocean temperatures, the melting of glaciers, rising sea levels, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural calamities and extreme weather events.

If countries, including India, continue to pursue a Business as Usual (BAU) development path, average global air temperatures are likely to rise to between 2oC to 4.5oC or higher by the turn of the 21st century.

A study by Nicholas Stern in 2007 suggests that with a 5oC to 6oC warming, an average of 5 to 10% loss in global gross domestic product (GDP) is possible, with poor countries suffering losses of more than 10% of GDP.

A study by Asian Development Bank in 2014 notes that without a global deviation from a fossil fuel intensive path, South Asia could lose an equivalent of 1.8% of its annual GDP by 2050, which will progressively increase to 8.8% by 2100 on an average under the BAU scenario.

Conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is part of the larger objective of building climate resilience and promoting good quality of life, human well-being and sustainable development.

While two of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly relate to nature (SDGs 14 and 15 covering marine and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity), most other SDGs relating to poverty, hunger, inequality, health and well-being, clean sanitation and water, energy are directly or indirectly linked to nature.

A survey among experts to assess how 16 ecosystem services could help in achieving the SDGs relating to good environment and human well-being suggested that ecosystem services could contribute to achieving about 41 targets across 12 SDGs. They also indicated cross-target interactions and synergetic outcomes across many SDGs.

Poor and marginalised people and indigenous communities depend on natural resources for their lives and livelihoods, and hence conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is of critical importance to their well-being. Nature provides a broad array of goods and services such as food, fuel, fodder, fibre and medicines that are critical to good quality of life and human well-being. Healthy and diverse ecosystems can play an important role in reducing vulnerability and building resilience to disasters and extreme weather events.

The global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services undertaken by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in 2019 notes that the current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services will undermine progress towards achieving 80% (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of SDGs related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land.

However, global assessment could only assess the consequences of trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services for 35 out of the 169 SDG targets due to data and knowledge gaps, and lack of clarity about the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem services and SDGs.

A report by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity notes that progress in achieving the 20 Aichi Biodiversity targets such as reducing the loss of all natural habitats including forests by at least 50% by 2020 has been poor, with most of the targets not being achieved or only partially realised.

There could be synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem services and human well-being.

For instance, a study notes that although policy interventions and incentives to enhance supply of provisioning services such as agricultural production have led to higher GDP, it may have an adverse effect on regulatory services (e.g., climate regulation; soil and water conservation) of ecosystems.

However, the inadequacies of traditional GDP as an indicator of well-being are well-known. In this context, the UK government’s Global Biodiversity Review report authored by Sir Partha Dasgupta argues for using the inclusive wealth approach to accurately measure social well-being by tracking the changes in produced, human and natural capital.

A UN report in 2018, which compared per capita GDP (income) growth in 140 countries with per capita (inclusive) wealth, noted that 44 out of 140 countries reported a decline in per capita (inclusive) wealth between 1990 to 2014, even though per capita GDP increased in most countries.

However, like GDP, the inclusive wealth index (IWI) has shortcomings and does not tell us anything about income distribution within countries, which affects social well-being.

An increase in benefits that people derive from ecosystems does not imply that gains will be shared equally due to skewed access to resources and markets, lack of technical knowledge and capacity, user conflicts. A study of shellfish harvesters in Canada noted that skewed access and other barriers resulted in benefits of enhanced shellfish harvesting being disproportionately shared by shellfish-dependent communities.

In a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, greater emphasis on the interactions between SDG targets may provide a roadmap for achieving multiple targets, as synergies and trade-offs can be considered.

Targets for human development and for nature need to be explicitly linked and account for socio-ecological feedback and multi-scale processes. To assess nature’s role and contributions to the SDGs there is a need to develop new indicators that link with the metrics tracked by the SDG framework.

The downturn in the global and national economies due to Covid-19 pandemic may have jeopardised achieving some SDGs, notably those relating to poverty, hunger, health and equality.

(The writer is Lead Author, Sixth
Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Geneva, and Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute-India, New Delhi)