Scientists have been demonstrating for decades that climate change and biodiversity are closely linked. However, it is only very recently that policy makers have shown real signs of grasping the need to view all natural systems, from wetlands to weather patterns, as holistically interactive. Simply put, you cannot change one thing in nature without impacting something else.
The good news is that restoring biodiversity is often a key and cost-effective measure to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Ecological restoration on a landscape scale can decelerate, and even reverse, global heating.
Some such measures are now becoming familiar. For example, extracting peat from bogs increases carbon emissions, while restoring bogs captures carbon from the atmosphere. And there are many other examples showing that restoring ecosystems brings multiple benefits, including climate mitigation.
The bad news is that scientifically targeted and massively scaled-up restoration measures – specifically envisaged under the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law – require coordination across government departments, State agencies and private land-owning interests, on a scale rarely seen.
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In its recent annual review on biodiversity, the chairperson of the Climate Change Advisory Council, Marie Donnelly, called for the rapid deepening of such coordination, coupled with increased funding to implement the Nature Restoration Law. She said that the Government “needs to create an integrated land use strategy to support climate, biodiversity and water goals”.
Such ambition, requiring a paradigm shift in our national political priorities, is challenging. It can only be achieved by heightened awareness of the dire consequences of not making such a shift.
There is now ample evidence that these include massive damage to our agriculture by climate instability, and severe disruption of our urban systems by related extreme weather events, particularly in coastal areas. The choice is ours, and we need to make it very soon.