Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

• Its links and interactions with climate change are underestimated, and any policy to address either in isolation will miss the mark.
• It’s impossible to take effective action against global warming without addressing our impact on the rest of the living world, and vice versa.

Fossil carbon, living carbon

• This requires that we adopt a two-pronged plan, aimed both at cutting down our reliance on both fossil and living carbon.
• There is no way to achieve carbon neutrality without a profound transformation in the use of living resources, to ensure the reflux of agricultural emissions and better protection of carbon sinks.
• For living carbon, we need to reinvest in the diversity of ecosystems to reduce agricultural emissions and protect carbon sinks as part of a bioeconomy.

From adding to subtracting

• They have all involved adding new energy sources to a system initially based on the use of biomass.
• Lowering emissions is not a matter of adding decarbonised sources to the energy system.
• Pricing carbon from fossil fuel use is a key way to reflect the increasing scarcity of the atmospheric capacity to store carbon.
• As the “gilets jaunes” protests in France showed, fossil carbon taxation without redistribution to the most vulnerable poses more problems than it solves.
• While fossil carbon taxation accelerates the energy transition, negative carbon taxes – in other words, fossil fuel subsidies – delay it.

Investing in the diversity of living beings

• Everything depends on what has been achieved on the second front of the transition, that of living carbon, the source of a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
• Agro-climatic transformation means finding ways to reinvest in biological diversity, in other words, in the abundance of living things.
• But the price of CO2 does not reflect the value of this diversity.
• In France, for example, the CO2 storage capacity of forests has been divided by three since 2005, mainly due to climatic factors.

The key issues of agriculture and food

• Depending on the techniques used, farming systems may themselves release carbon into the atmosphere (deep ploughing, draining of wet soils, etc.)
• or, on the contrary, store it in living soils (conservation agriculture, agroforestry, etc.).
• As in the case of energy, the agroclimatic transition implies, on the demand side, that we consume smarter and less.
• The use of food rations might be one way of achieving this, according to the recommendations of the world’s health authorities.

Remembering the ocean

• are altering marine biodiversity, a crucial component in the storage of CO2 by the oceans.
• Protecting the ocean sink is vital to stabilise tomorrow’s climate: it is estimated that the continental biosphere contains four times more carbon than the atmosphere.

• Invasive alien species are driving biodiversity loss and extinctions in every country, all over the world.
• Responding to the challenge, the United Nations is today releasing the first global assessment of invasive alien species and their control.
• Over four years, 86 expert authors from 49 countries gathered the latest scientific evidence and Indigenous and local knowledge on invasive alien species.

Hope in the face of increasing threats

• This triggered further assessment to determine the current global state of biological invasions, the effectiveness of our existing responses, and recommended management and policy options.
• The world faces increasing biosecurity threats, but effective management can prevent or lessen the extent of subsequent biological invasions.

The experience in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

• Aotearoa New Zealand has almost 900.
• Aotearoa New Zealand suffers from invasive Australian possums.
• Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have among the highest modern global native species extinction rates.
• Australia is the worst in the world for mammals, while Aotearoa New Zealand has experienced tragic loss in endemic birds, largely due to invasive species.

Coordinate, consult and prioritise

• But to do so, we’ll need coherent policy across primary production and logistic sectors, better education and greater public awareness.
• We need to coordinate and prioritise our efforts, from offshore ports to border control and quarantine, through to eradication or containment of any new pests and weeds.
• This cuts red tape for businesses that manage import risks and produce pre-costed and co-designed emergency response agreements.
• Australia’s approach to rabbit control using a virus was a world-first and it remains in use 70 years later.

One world, ‘One Biosecurity’

• Frequent interceptions of pests, weeds, and diseases at our border highlight the pressure we are under.
• We will have to simply become smarter, more effective, and better coordinated across the human, animal, plant and ecosystem health sectors.
• Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand can play a much stronger leadership role in managing biosecurity risks in the Pacific.
• He is a member of the Biosecurity Advisory Groups of both Environment Canterbury and Zespri.