intro on climate change and biodiversity

Climate Change and BiodiversityIntroduction

Climate change is the variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period, typically decades or longer. It encompasses temperature increases ("global warming"), sea-level rises, changes in precipitation patterns, and increased frequencies of extreme weather events. In particular, recent findings by the scientific community suggest that global warming is causing shifts in species spatial distributions that average 6.1 km per decade towards the poles—or m per decade upward—in the direction predicted by climate change models, and that spring is on average, arriving 2.3 days earlier per decade in temperate latitudes. Entire regions are also suffering from the effects of global warming; in particular boreal and polar ecosystems.
Although past changes in the global climate resulted in major shifts in species ranges and marked reorganization of biological communities, landscapes, and biomes during the last 1.8 million years, these changes occurred in a landscape that was not as fragmented as it is today, and with little or no pressures from human activities. On the one hand, current climate change coupled with other human pressures is stressing biodiversity far beyond the levels imposed by the global climatic change that occurred in the recent evolutionary past. On the other hand, the human component needs to be incorporated when dealing with the impacts of climate change on biodiversity—that is, activities aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change in which biodiversity considerations are essential.
The impacts of climate change on biodiversity are therefore of major concern to the Convention. At its fifth meeting in 2000, the Conference of the Parties highlighted the risks, in particular, to coral reefs (decision V/3) and to forest ecosystems (decision V/4), and drew attention to the serious impacts of loss of biodiversity of these systems on people’s livelihoods. More recently, the Conference of the Parties turned its attention to the potential impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems of the various options for mitigating or adapting to climate change and requested the Convention’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) to develop scientific advice on these issues (SBSTTA recommendation VI/7).
SBSTTA therefore established in 2001 an ad hoc technical expert group to carry out an assessment of the interlinkages between biodiversity and climate change and produced in 2003 a Technical Report based on the best available scientific knowledge, including that provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The reports concludes that there are significant opportunities for mitigating climate change, and for adapting to climate change while enhancing the conservation of biodiversity. The report also identifies a suite of tools, including the ecosystem approach, that can help decision makers assess the likely impacts and make informed choices, and examines the likely impacts of adaptation options in different terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, covered by the thematic areas of the Convention.
At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), world leader’s reaffirmed the central importance of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the objectives of the two conventions are mutually supportive: climate change is one of the threats to biodiversity, and the need for its rate to be reduced to allow ecosystems to adjust to climate change is recognized in the objective of the UNFCCC. In this context, and at its seventh meeting in 2004, the Conference of the Parties in its decision VII/15 further requested SBSTTA to develop advice for promoting synergy among activities to address climate change at the national, regional and international level, including activities to combat desertification and land degradation, and activities for the conservation of and sustainable use of biodiversity and invited the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC and to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) to collaborate with the CBD to this end.