Biodiversity and Climate Change: Workshop Report

In December 2020, 50 of the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts appointed by the IPBES and IPCC held a virtual workshop “to examine the synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation and adaptation. It represents the first-ever collaboration between the two intergovernmental science-policy bodies.”
In the report, IPCC and IPBES emphasize that “climate and biodiversity are intertwined through mechanistic links and feedbacks”; limiting global warming and protecting biodiversity “are mutually supporting goals…essential for sustainability.”

Overall, the focus of the workshop -and the report- was to provide an overview of these relationships. For instance, the impact and risk of likely future changes for terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people’s quality of life, along with the feedbacks of changes on climate characteristics. Furthermore, it also counted on its objectives to discuss the opportunities, challenges, and risks of mitigation and adaptation options for biodiversity along with the “evaluation of the synergies, trade-offs, and effectiveness of policies and governance structures that simultaneously address climate change and biodiversity loss at all scales, including in urban areas.”