Climate change solutions not always good for biodiversity [Video]

Some approaches to tackling global warming can have unintended knock-on consequences for nature and the protection of biodiversity, say scientists urging a more coordinated effort on these challenges.

“Sometimes by trying to find a solution to a problem, we risk creating damage elsewhere,” Anne Larigauderie at the Intergovernmental Scientific and Political Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES), an expert independent body, told AFP.

The IPBES will publish a report in December on how different crises — including climate change and biodiversity loss — are closely related and should be addressed together, not in isolation.

The IPBES and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in 2021 that a siloed approach risked “actions which, inadvertently, prevent the resolution of one or the other problem, or even both.”

In Britain, for example, an ostensibly sound policy of planting trees on wetlands backfired when in turn these carbon-rich landscapes dried up, releasing the …