07
Jan
Report Links Biodiversity, Water, Food, and Health In Critique To Avert Escalating Crises
(Beyond Pesticides, January 7, 2025) A report, released in December 2024 from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), confronts the problem of “siloing” environmental elements—food, health, water, biodiversity and climate change—when they instead intersect at a nexus from which each element affects all the others. The problem is essentially that all the elements are part of the same crisis, yet actions to address issues within each—and, importantly, to resist addressing them—are dealt with in isolation. A proper perspective, gleaned from the report, is to view each element from the center where all parts meet, thus addressing the issues in coordination.
According to the IPBES report, “[F]ragmented governance of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change with different institutions and actors often working on disconnected and siloed policy agendas, resulting in conflicting objectives and duplication of efforts.” The IPBES is an independent body analogous to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but structured similarly and in close contact with the United Nations (UN). The new report comes at the behest of IPBES’s 147 member countries—75 percent of the UN’s membership—to address the interconnections among the five global crises.
The report strongly demonstrates that a holistic, globe-spanning frame of mind must be adopted to cope with the global crisis. For example, human health cannot be separated from healthy food production practices and clean water. Nor can the effects of climate change and biodiversity on human health and the food supply be ignored. IPBES stresses that without coordination, improvement in one area can damage conditions in another area, resulting in tradeoffs and unintended consequences that impede actual progress. Feedback loops can amplify tradeoffs, for instance through attempts to couple soil carbon capture with energy production, causing environmental deterioration. But if beneficial changes in, say, food production, are coordinated with beneficial changes in water management, the effects can be synergistic in a positive way for all the elements.
Beyond Pesticides supports the increased application of organic agriculture as a primary way of integrating solutions to each of the elements now treated in isolation. Organic protects biodiversity, preserves water quality, protects food quality and therefore human health, and mitigates climate change. The IPBES report stresses that current “food first” approaches to agriculture prioritize food production using energy-intensive, polluting and toxic methods, which improves nutritional health but relies on what IPBES calls “unsustainable intensification and increased per capita consumption.” Beyond Pesticides’ advocacy for nature-based solutions, such as protecting pollinators, discouraging monoculture, eliminating pesticides, and enhancing soil health, improve the food element while also being synergistic with other parts of the nexus.
IPBES also emphasizes that there are countervailing forces rooted in short-term financial gains for “a small number of people while ignoring [the] negative impacts” that affect “the well-being of some more than others.” For example, “[I]ncreases in unsustainable food production have been associated with land conversion and the expansion of unsustainable agricultural practices, particularly driven by affluence. Such practices have led to biodiversity loss, reduced water availability and quality, increases in greenhouse gas emissions and [increased risk] of pathogen emergence.” In other words, an economy that produces affluence for its own sake destroys the global system that produces life. And the affluence is generally confined to a very small stratum of humanity, leaving the consequences to the least affluent.
Such economic drivers are considered indirect influences on global environmental degradation. In fact, the trends in indirect drivers are nearly the exact opposite of trends in the nexus elements. Gross domestic product, exports, population growth and urbanization increased dramatically between 1970 and 2020, while freshwater availability and species survival plunged and climate-related disasters spiked.
The IBPES report also notes that “Global agrobiodiversity, including genetic resources for food and agriculture, is declining (with global food production heavily dependent on just 9 crop species that contribute to 65 per cent of the world’s crop production.” Nor has increased food production improved nutritional quality. And human health is certainly not improving. According to the report: “Unsustainable farming systems contribute to biodiversity loss, excessive water use, pollution and climate change, which further exacerbates health problems. Increased air and water pollution caused an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2019 (16 per cent of all deaths worldwide) through diseases such as respiratory disease, cancer, allergies, birth defects, neurodegenerative disease and impaired cognitive development. Emerging and reemerging infectious disease events have been rising, with half of these driven by changes in land use, agricultural practices and activities that encroach on natural habitats and lead to increased contact between wildlife, domestic animals and humans. . . Transforming to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems would deliver multiple benefits to the nexus elements and would help countries address land conversion and unsustainable agricultural practices.”
The report estimates that over half of global gross domestic product (GDP), $58 trillion in 2023, is generated by economic sectors moderately or highly dependent on nature. At the same time, externalities—costs not accounted for in the economic calculus—include $10-25 trillion of negative effects of fossil fuels and harmful practices in agriculture and fisheries, $5.3 trillion in private sector financing of such negatives, and public subsidies incentivizing the negatives. One of the obvious implications of the IPBES report is that there is no such thing as an externality when it comes to calculating the costs and benefits of a functioning ecosphere.
The report also constructs six approaches it calls “archetypes” and ranks them according to their synergistic positive outcomes on human health: nature-oriented, a balance of nexuses, conservation first, climate first, food first and nature overexploitation. The top three are the nature-oriented, balanced, and conservation first archetypes. IPBES unequivocally selects the “nature-oriented nexus” as the strongest positive outcome and, not coincidentally, the approach that provides the most synergy among the five elements of climate, biodiversity, water, food and human health. The nature-oriented nexus” emphasizes strong environmental regulation, sustainable agricultural practices, lower rates of global per capita consumption, and strong development of green technologies.”
At the bottom, privileging food, climate, and nature exploitation produce the worst outcomes. Only emphasizing the simultaneous and coordinated policies and practices will accomplish the goals of each individual nexus.
This could be counterintuitive for advocates of organic and regenerative agriculture, unless the goal contains an understanding of the interdependent, interactive nature of the nexus elements, and of the possibility of positive or negative reinforcements and feedbacks. Unless carefully constructed, a food first scenario might include harmful expansion of fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, and fertilizer pollution. In other words, in order to avoid negative consequences for both food and the other global elements, food production must abandon conventional agriculture’s dependence on highly industrialized products, many of its practices, and possibly some of its foundational political and economic supports. For example, as Beyond Pesticides has shown, courts tend to balance allegations of pesticide harms against corporations’ right to make a profit. This is itself an extreme imbalance of the values that make human life sustainable.
Beyond Pesticides strongly supports the de-siloing of the five nexus elements discussed in the IPBES report and has provided detailed information about the interdependencies of biodiversity, food, climate, water and human health for decades. Beyond Pesticides’ Annual Report for 2023-2024 details not only o organization’s communication of news and the latest science, but how this foundation provides support for actions aimed at changing not only agricultural and land management practices but also corporate accountability and public policy decision-making.
Biodiversity in Land Management Integral to Sustainability, in the winter 2016-2017 issues of Pesticides and You provides a deep analysis of the damage that monoculture and pesticides do to biodiversity, and the many ways that biodiversity-aware agriculture, such as cover crops, interbedding pollinator-friendly plants with food crops, and crop rotation can combat that damage. A June 2024 Daily News highlights a study showing that pesticides contaminate aquatic algae, triggering cascade effects through all trophic levels. These in turn affect four important elements: water, biodiversity, human health and food.
The report concludes that: “[S]ustainable healthy diets, reduced food loss and waste and ecological intensification and sustainable intensification of agriculture and ecosystem restoration can be combined (i.e., bundled together) and incentivized and driven by behaviour change to reduce land conversion and water pollution, halt or reverse biodiversity loss, improve human health, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some response options in and of themselves are similar to bundles in that they comprise multiple synergistic actions, such as Indigenous food systems that emerge from Indigenous and local knowledge and traditional practices and which are based on holistic worldviews.”
Beyond Pesticides has highlighted numerous examples of purported climate-friendly agricultural technologies that do far more harm than good. A good example from the November 15, 2024 Daily News exposes how schemes to yoke carbon capture to energy generation in agriculture can lead to disaster. Organic agriculture can preserve and rebuild soil carbon without using biofuels such as biochar and ethanol, both of which have major downsides. The connections between agricultural chemicals and damage to human health fill the scientific literature and is captured in Beyond Pesticides’ Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database.
Making this change can seem overwhelming given the economic and political trends of the moment. However, there are many ways to implement progressive policies—what the report calls “response options”—short of convincing recalcitrant politicians and business tycoons at national and international levels. The report also notes that there are already three important international agreements: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Paris Agreement, that will be strengthened and advanced by IPBES’s 71 recommended response options.
The report contains a helpful figure (SPM.7, p.23) showing how particular applications in a broad category like coordinating planning and governance policies, can include development of city region food systems, which in turn contributes to the element “food” and mitigates climate change in coordination with various other steps like integrating watershed and health interventions, making urban infrastructure water-sensitive, and so on.
Thus, there are numerous granular projects that can be implemented without having to move the needle at the macro level. Local changes can “emerge from coordinated networks by drawing on social knowledge and integrating actions across sectors by increasing collaboration among diverse actors.” Beyond Pesticides’ Parks for a Sustainable Future program illustrates steps that can be taken at the local level to eliminate the use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizer. The IPBES report places great emphasis on urban nature-based solutions. A World Wildlife Fund report highlights cities that have adopted such solutions by building greenways, swales, green roofs and many other landscape changes that mitigate natural disaster impacts, clean polluted water, remove atmospheric carbon, provide human health benefits, and foster biodiversity. These are steps that can take place locally and regionally even if the national wheels of progress are grinding slowly or in reverse.
The current health, biodiversity, and climate crises are the most profound problems humanity has yet encountered and calls for dismantling siloes, integrating knowledge among disciplines and between actions, and committing to changing some of our most basic beliefs and dogmas. This is not an optional process; it is life or death, not only for human civilization but for the environmental processes that sustain it. But we can take beneficial steps across the broad spectrum of human activity as long as we consider their effects on the multiple health and environmental elements that intersect, and keep our eyes on the prize of a healthy, abundant, and sustainable planet.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Sources:
Summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health (nexus assessment)
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
ADVANCE UNEDITED VERSION
16 December 2024
https://ipbes.canto.de/pdfviewer/viewer/viewer.html?v=IPBES11Media&portalType=v%2FIPBES11Media&column=document&id=cj0uc5396d1ed5418tsuic2r45&suffix=pdf&print=1
Scientists from 57 countries want to end siloed decision-making on climate and biodiversity
Joseph Winters
Grist Dec 18, 2024
https://grist.org/solutions/ipbes-un-panel-biodiversity-ecosystem-services-nexus-report-namibia/
IPBES: Tackle Together Five Interlinked Global Crises in Biodiversity, Water, Food, Health and Climate Change
Media Release: IPBES Nexus Assessment
16 December 2024
https://www.ipbes.net/nexus/media-release
Business As Usual “Carbon Capture” Undermines Organic Land Management as a Climate Solution
Beyond Pesticides, November 15, 2024
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/11/business-as-usual-carbon-capture-undermines-transition-to-organic-land-management-as-a-climate-solution/
