Collaboration & Co-Creation

The Webs We Weave:
Our 5 Most Urgent Global Crises Must Be Addressed Together

Landmark reports highlight interconnectivity of biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks and climate change; the trillions in opportunities that await immediate, coordinated action; and the trillions in unaccounted-for costs of current, siloed approaches to these inextricable crises.

Published 6 hours ago | About a 9 minute read

Image: Google DeepMind

The world’s most pressing environmental, social and economic crises — biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks and climate change — all interact, cascade and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive. Not only will addressing them strategically and concurrently create trillions in economic benefits and help ensure our long-term survival, the costs of delaying action even a decade will be insurmountable.

In two new reports, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) asserts that immediate action to address the biodiversity crisis could unlock massive business and innovation opportunities, generating $10 trillion and supporting 395 million jobs worldwide by 2030. Conversely, delaying action on biodiversity goals by even a decade could double the cost of acting now and delaying action on climate change adds at least $500 billion per year in additional costs.

The reports emphasize that without urgent, coordinated action to address the five interdependent “nexus” challenges, we will not achieve a just and sustainable world where all life can thrive.

The ‘IPCC for biodiversity’

Often described as the ‘IPCC for Biodiversity,’ the IPBES is the independent international body that provides decision-makers with the most comprehensive scientific information on nature-related issues. An important aspect of IPBES’ work is to provide the science and evidence needed to support achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement. Its two new, landmark studies — launched last week in Windhoek, Namibia during the 11th IPBES Plenary — hold critical, actionable insights into solutions for a just and sustainable future.

‘Transformative Change’ Report

IPBES’ Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity – also known as the Transformative Change Report – estimates the cost of delaying actions to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by even a decade to be double that of acting now. Immediately shifting toward regenerative and nature-positive economic approaches can also unlock massive business and innovation opportunities. Recent estimates are that more than $10 trillion in business opportunity value could be generated and 395 million jobs could be supported globally by 2030.

'Nexus' Report

The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health — aka the Nexus Report — builds on the findings of the Transformative Change report. It offers decision-makers around the world the most ambitious scientific assessment ever undertaken of these complex interconnections and explores more than five dozen response options to maximize co-benefits across the five “nexus elements.”

The product of three years’ work by 165 leading international experts from 57 countries, the Nexus Report shows that scenarios focusing on synergies among biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change have the best likely outcomes — and that trying to address any of the Nexus challenges in isolation seriously limits the chances of fixing the others.

Systems thinking in action

Ever since the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in 2022, we’ve seen a growing awareness of the connection between healthy biodiversity, a livable climate and a healthy world — and therefore, healthy businesses. This realization has spawned a host of corporate and government strategies for achieving the Summit’s goal of halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 — and a corresponding explosion in research, tools, science-based target frameworks, coalitions and financial mechanisms aimed at helping companies understand, quantify and offset their impacts on the natural world.

It's a great start, but we must go even further beyond “carbon tunnel vision” for our efforts to be fruitful. IPBES’ Nexus Report echoes findings of a 2023 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research study that highlighted a domino effect between the climate tipping points of seemingly disparate systems across the world; and a 2024 report by The Lancet, which concluded that failing to consider interactions between climate, biodiversity and infectious disease will not address the fundamental issues affecting each — and the consequences will be “exponentially more expensive.”

Why siloed approaches won’t work

Image credit: IPBES

The Nexus assessment shows how these crises all interact, cascade and compound each other — making efforts to address them separately ineffective and counterproductive. For example:

A ‘food-first’ approach prioritizes food production with positive benefits on nutritional health — achieved through unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption — would have negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.
An exclusive focus on climate change could result in increased competition for land, causing negative outcomes for biodiversity and food.
Weak environmental regulation worsens impacts for biodiversity, food, human health and climate change.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos to better manage, govern and improve the impact of actions in one nexus element on other elements,” said Prof. Paula Harrison Principal Natural Capital Scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and co-chair of the Assessment. “Take, for example, the health challenge of schistosomiasis — a parasitic disease that can cause life-long ill health and which affects more than 200 million people worldwide, especially in Africa. Treated only as a health challenge — usually, through medication — the problem often recurs as people are reinfected. An innovative project in rural Senegal took a different approach — reducing water pollution and removing invasive water plants to reduce the habitat for the snails that host the parasitic worms that carry the disease — resulting in a 32 percent reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater and new revenue for the local communities.”

An integrated approach will therefore help the global community create a more equitable, livable world for all while reaching the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement and the SDGs.

Past and current challenges

Ongoing declines in biodiversity around the world — largely due to human activity — have direct and dire impacts on food security and nutrition, water quality and availability, health and wellbeing outcomes, resilience to climate change and almost all of nature’s other contributions to people.

IPBES’ 2022 Values Assessment Report and 2019 Global Assessment Report identified the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss — including land- and sea-use change, unsustainable exploitation, invasive species and pollution. The Nexus Report builds on these and further underscores how indirect socioeconomic drivers — such as increasing waste, overconsumption and population growth — intensify the direct drivers, worsening impacts on all parts of the nexus. The majority of 12 assessed indicators across these indirect drivers — including GDP, population levels and overall food supply — have all increased or accelerated since 2001.

“Efforts of governments and other stakeholders have often failed to take into account indirect drivers and their impact on interactions between nexus elements because they remain fragmented, with many institutions working in isolation — often resulting in conflicting objectives, inefficiencies and negative incentives, leading to unintended consequences,” Harrison said.

Notably, the report highlights the undeniable business case for addressing all these crises together: More than half of global GDP — over $50 trillion of annual economic activity — is moderately to highly dependent on nature. And the estimated, unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity, in the trillions, are no longer ignorable.

“Current decision-making has prioritized short-term financial returns while ignoring costs to nature and failed to hold actors to account for negative economic pressures on the natural world,” said Pamela McElwee, Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and co-chair of the Assessment. “It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity — reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production — are at least $10-25 trillion per year.”

Delaying the action needed to meet policy goals will also increase the costs of delivering it. Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for example, could as much as double costs — also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinctions. Delayed action on climate change adds at least $500 billion per year in additional costs for meeting policy targets.

Future scenarios

The report also examines future challenges by assessing 186 scenarios from 52 separate studies — which project interactions between three or more of the nexus elements — mostly covering the periods up to 2050 and 2100.

“Future scenarios do exist that have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co-benefits across the nexus elements,” Harrison said. “The future scenarios with the widest nexus benefits are those with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.”

Existing win-win-win solutions

The report highlights a significant number of existing, low-cost responses — on a policy, political and community level — to sustainably managing the nexus elements synergistically, including:

restoring carbon-rich ecosystems including forests, soils and mangroves;
managing biodiversity to reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases;
improving integrated landscape and seascape management;
urban nature-based solutions;
sustainable, healthy diets;
and supporting Indigenous food systems.

The report also examines other response options that may not have as many synergistic benefits: For example, offshore wind power and dams may have negative impacts on other nexus elements if not carefully implemented.

The more than 70 response options presented in the report, taken together, support the achievement of all 17 SDGs, all 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the long-term goals for climate change mitigation and adaptation of the Paris Agreement. 24 of the response options advance more than five SDGs and more than five of the Global Biodiversity Framework targets.

Implementing response options together or in sequence can further improve their positive impacts and achieve cost savings. Ensuring inclusive participation — ex: including Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the co-design, governance and implementation of response options — can also increase the benefits and equity of these measures: “Some good examples include marine protected areas that have included communities in management and decision-making,” McElwee said. “These have led to increases in biodiversity, greater abundance of fish to feed people, improved incomes for local communities and often increased tourism revenues as well.”

The report offers a series of eight steps to help policymakers, communities, civil society and other stakeholders identify problems and shared values in order to work together towards solutions for just and sustainable futures — presented as a graphical roadmap for nexus action.

“The best way to bridge single-issue silos is through integrated and adaptive decision-making,” McElwee said. “‘Nexus approaches’ offer policies and actions that are more coherent and coordinated — moving us towards the transformative change needed to meet our development and sustainability goals.”