Climate and biodiversity crises are entwined, but we risk pitting one against other

By Nathalie Seddon and Audrey Wagner for The Conversation

Climate change and biodiversity policies have largely evolved in isolation, even though the two crises are deeply intertwined. They have their own UN summits, with the same name and numbering system: the UN biodiversity summit COP16 just concluded in Colombia, while the climate summit COP29 is happening right now in Azerbaijan. Confusingly, there’s also a summit on desertification in Saudi Arabia in December, also called COP16.

The three summits in quick succession make this is an important opportunity to align these agendas. Healthy ecosystems are crucial for climate resilience, while a stable climate is essential to protecting biodiversity.

Take Brazil, which could fulfil nearly 80 per cent of its net zero pledge by halting deforestation and restoring native vegetation. Not only would this preserve vast amounts of carbon, it would also safeguard a significant portion of the planet’s biodiversity.

Political support for a more integrated approach is gathering momentum. At the recent biodiversity summit, leaders stressed the need to align national climate targets with biodiversity goals. This builds on recent initiatives such as the Rio Trio initiative, where the heads of the UN’s conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification committed to unified action.

Latin America appears to be stepping up its leadership on biodiversity-climate synergies, which is crucial given the region holds much of the world’s biodiversity and land-based carbon. More than 70 global leaders called on presidents Petro of Colombia and Lula of Brazil to lead efforts on climate, nature and food security. Brazil also renewed its pledge to restore 12 million hectares of native ecosystems by 2030, which is extremely encouraging.

Missed opportunities But despite these promising developments, the biodiversity summit exposed troubling gaps between climate and biodiversity policy. For instance, key language addressing the need to transition away from fossil fuels and warning about the dangers of bioenergy was deleted from the summit’s final text.

Bioenergy involves cultivating plants chosen or engineered for high biomass yield, which can be burned directly to produce energy or processed into biofuels for use in vehicles. A paragraph in earlier drafts had warned of the risks this poses to biodiversity: Noting that the large-scale deployment of intensive bioenergy plantations, including monocultures, replacing natural forests and subsistence farmland, will likely have negative impacts on biodiversity and can threaten food and water security, as well as local livelihoods, including by intensifying social conflicts.

Those risks are all very real. Yet this paragraph was removed due to opposition from several large bioenergy-producing countries.

Bioenergy is a biodiversity risk The omission is particularly troubling given how many net zero strategies rely on turning over huge amounts of land for carbon dioxide removal. This often means either creating monoculture plantations of non-native trees on a massive scale, or growing bioenergy crops and then capturing and storing the carbon they emit when burned – a still speculative technology known as BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage).

One recent study revealed that global net zero commitments may demand around 990 million hectares of land for carbon removal by 2060. That’s an area nearly the size of the US and equivalent to two-thirds of the world’s cropland. This poses serious risks to biodiversity and food security, especially in regions where land is scarce and competition is fierce.

The projected impacts are troubling: lower-income nations, particularly in Africa, have pledged disproportionately large land areas for carbon removal, often benefiting high-emitting industrialised nations or oil-producing states. This raises concerns about land appropriation and food insecurity. In some cases, pledged areas even exceed a country’s total land area, underscoring unrealistic and overestimated goals.

This and other recent high-profile studies contribute to a growing body of evidence cautioning against the global scaling-up of bioenergy crops, which often struggle to meet essential social and ecological sustainability criteria.

Moreover, when assessed across their full lifecycle, from seed to electricity, the presumed advantage of bioenergy over fossil energy is often very unclear. Growing huge fields of a single crop (a monoculture) is also highly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as droughts.

Don’t trade off carbon for biodiversity The scientific consensus is clear: we cannot address climate change by industrialising the biosphere. Effective climate solutions must protect ecosystem integrity and support biodiversity, not compromise them for carbon gains.

This requires not only stronger coordination between the UN’s climate, biodiversity and desertification conventions, but more inclusive governance structures that amplify the leadership of Indigenous peoples, whose lands are home to large swathes of the world’s biodiversity and carbon. This is why it was so significant that the recent biodiversity summit established a new permanent subsidiary body, enabling the “full and effective participation” of Indigenous people in protecting biodiversity.

At COP29 in Azerbaijan and at next year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, there is hope that Latin American countries will continue to lead the way in promoting integrated climate-biodiversity action. In our race to cool the planet, we must ensure we don’t compromise the health of the biosphere on which we depend.

Nathalie Seddon is a Professor of Biodiversity and Director of the Nature-based Solutions and Agile Initiatives at the University of Oxford.

Audrey Wagner is a Researcher and Programme Coordinator, Nature-Based Solutions Initiative, University of Oxford.