Climate change and loss of biodiversity are two parallel and strongly interlinked crises, and both are clearly connected to human activities. There is an increasing demand for actions to halt these negative developments, and to counteract detrimental impacts on the world’s ecosystems and humanity. However, the success of such actions might be impeded by the fact that climate change and biodiversity loss are often treated separately in policy, management and the public debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regularly evaluates the current state of knowledge regarding climate change, its impacts and mitigation.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is tasked with assessing the global status of biodiversity, and how changes in biodiversity affect human well-being. Both the IPCC and IPBES have presented conclusions on the state of the planet in recent reports, and have evaluated likely and potential ways forward for the global community in relation to the presented results. The IPCC highlights the need for ambitious climate targets and the need for the global community to act quickly to halt and limit global warming, stating that the faster the current emission trends can be broken, the better our prospects for minimizing negative impacts and climate-related risk, including risks for the functioning of the world’s ecosystems. The IPBES reports confirm the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services for human societies at global, regional and local scales. However, human activities are having strong negative impacts on biodiversity today, which are further aggravated by climate change.
In this report, we highlight selected findings in recent IPCC and IPBES reports, with a particular focus on connections between climate and biodiversity. We also use the reports of the IPCC and IPBES as a starting point to discuss interactions between climate change and biodiversity loss from a Swedish perspective, including presentations of selected examples of research focusing on such interplays. Finally, a selection of current and future challenges and needs related to climate change adaptation and biodiversity management in Sweden are highlighted and discussed. The report is produces by researchers from Lund University and the Department of Aquatic Resources at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) under a collaboration between the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI, national contact point for the IPCC), the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (national contact point for IPBES).
If measures targeting climate change or biodiversity loss are to be successful, they must consider how the two stressors may interact. Additionally, it is important to ensure that policies and management actions build on available scientific knowledge. Climate change has impacts on all types of ecosystems today, for example through changes in temperature and precipitation or through an increasing frequency of extreme weather events, such as storms, heat waves and droughts. As it progresses, global warming will result in species extinctions, range-shifts, and changes in local community compositions, with consequences for ecosystem processes including those that constitute ecosystem services to humans. Most of the world’s ecosystems are also affected by other human activities, not least changes in land-use, which further increases their sensitivity to pressures caused by climate change. Human impacts on ecosystems have already resulted in biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem functioning, with consequences for ecosystems’ abilities to contribute to human welfare, and this trend is foreseen to continue. Effects resulting in loss of ecosystem integrity may indeed also erode the resilience of ecosystems to climate change. Climate change and biodiversity loss are further linked through human actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change, and it is now known that such interactions can be both negative and positive, and vice versa.
In Sweden, climate change is likely to impact biodiversity and ecosystem services in both natural and managed ecosystems, including arctic regions, forests, agroecosystems, coastal and marine areas, freshwaters as well as urban environments. These impacts need to be considered from a mitigation perspective, but there are also ample possibilities to plan for nature-based solutions that can achieve positive synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. For example, parallel goals of production and biodiversity preservation can be met in forest management, if this is planned and conducted with the aim of delivering multiple societal benefits. The adaptation of agriculture to new climatic conditions will create opportunities for, but also involve risks to biodiversity, and an explicit consideration of synergies will for example be needed with any increased demand of biomass for bioenergy purposes. Improved planning and conservation is particularly urgent in Sweden’s marine ecosystems, where climate change is expected to influence their biodiversity and productivity, as well as the ecosystems’ resilience to additional pressures, such as fishing and eutrophication. An increased need for renewable energy from, for example, offshore wind farms further enhances the need to integrate ecosystem perspectives in marine management. We discuss these and more examples further in the report.
As shown by the reports from both the IPCC and IPBES, there is an urgent need for interventions to halt climate change as well as biodiversity loss, and to mitigate the negative consequences of these changes. Therefore, it is crucial to find synergies and avoid conflicts between measures targeting climate change and those targeting biodiversity. This could for example mean identifying and promoting ecosystem- and nature-based solutions in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Both the IPCC and IPBES emphasise the need for a transformative change in society in order to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. In many cases – including in Sweden – achieving this will require integrated management across different levels of governance. Measures for climate change mitigation and adaptation can often be coordinated with measures for preserving biodiversity. However, such synergies will not happen by themselves, and therefore must be explicitly included in the planning stage. Developing a landscape perspective to management could facilitate positive synergies and serve to reduce potential local conflicts of interest. Since what is done or not done in the short term affects the need and possibility for future action, it is pivotal that measures operating on both the short and long term are considered simultaneously. A fundamental requirement for achieving positive synergies is the dissemination, evaluation and development of knowledge, and the establishment and maintenance of continuous dialogue between researchers and policy-makers at different levels.