New Report Shows Extreme Biodiversity Loss Globally, Demonstrates Urgent Need for Urban Action on Nature

A new international scientific report warns of grave impacts to come as nature declines at an unprecedented rate. The report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimated that one million species are threatened with extinction today and that extinction rates are accelerating.

It is the first global assessment on the state of biodiversity since 2005. Called “the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,” it finds that the current global response is insufficient and transformative change is needed.

The global assessment is “the most important report the world needs to take note of. We want to thank and salute the scientific community from around the world who worked for so many long hours, weeks, months and indeed years to bring us the report, with its very clear wake-up call,” said Kobie Brand, Global Director, ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Center.

The report was authored by 145 experts – with contributions from 300 more – from 50 countries and took three years to create. It is based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, as well as indigenous and local knowledge and charts the changes seen in biodiversity from the last fifty years, showing the relationship between economic development and impacts on nature.

Sunandan Tiwari, Director Global Implementation at ICLEI World Secretariat, represented the organization at the stakeholder day prior to the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, at which members adopted the report. ICLEI’s message was “as urbanization is one of the key threats to biodiversity, we encourage IPBES members to engage local and regional governments in the second work programme.” The second work programme is the next phase of activities to be carried out by IPBES.

The report also presents a collection of potential actions in urban areas to protect biodiversity. These include implementation of nature-based solutions, increasing access to urban services and a healthy urban environment for low-income communities, improving access to green spaces, and sustainable production and consumption and ecological connectivity within urban spaces, particularly with native species, as strategies for change.

The release was accompanied by strong messages on the importance of nature through the METZ Biodiversity charter adopted by the G7 Environment Ministers which specifically calls for the engagement of local and other subnational governments and the OECD report on the economic value of nature which makes the business case for action on biodiversity.

The original article appeared on ICLEI‘s website.

 

By Rob McDonald, Lead Scientist for Global Cities, The Nature Conservancy

This century will be remembered as the urban century. Our generation will witness the most significant urban growth in human history. By 2050, there will be 2.4 billion more people in cities, a rate of urban growth that is the equivalent of building a city the population of New York City every six weeks. Humanity will have urbanized an area of 1.2 million km2, larger than the nation of Colombia.

Cities have been called humanity’s greatest invention, a way of living that can bring many benefits. Relative to more rural areas, cities have increased economic productivity and innovation, greater opportunities for education and individual enhancement, and more efficient use of resources. But the rapid growth of cities presents a challenge to the global environment, both directly through the expansion of their footprint and indirectly through urban energy and resource use. How can there be space for the natural world in an urban world?

Dozens of the world’s scientists have united to answer these questions, in a new effort we call the Nature in the Urban Century Assessment, which finds that urbanization trends could result in significant biodiversity loss, if global leaders do not take timely action to invest in more sustainable cities.

The goal of the Nature in the Urban Century Assessment is to describe globally where and how to conserve nature in the face of urban growth, for the benefit of both biodiversity and human well-being. Our report projects that urban growth could threaten 290,000 km2 of natural habitat between 2000 and 2030. Habitat loss will be most extensive in temperate and tropical forests, including key areas for global biodiversity conservation. Targeted action in these places facing outsized impact—which include parts of the United States, Brazil, Nigeria and China—could make a real difference in preventing biodiversity loss.

A large proportion of some other biomes, including Mediterranean-type habitat and mangroves, will also be affected. We show that biodiversity loss will be spatially concentrated, with urban growth in a few specific places having an outsized impact on biodiversity globally. For instance, conservation action on just 49,000 km2 could help protect Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) at risk from urban growth.

Urban growth could also affect parks and other protected natural areas. By 2030, we project that 40 percent of strictly protected areas (where resource harvesting is forbidden) and one in two loosely protected areas will be within 50 km of an urban area. This increased proximity will raise the likelihood of negative impacts on these urban-adjacent protected areas, as well as increase management costs.

Maasai Giraffes in Nairobi National Park, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya

Furthermore, accelerating urban growth—if poorly managed—could negatively impact the world’s response to climate change. How cities grow will affect the amount of energy they use for transportation and heating, with big implications for greenhouse gas emissions. And habitat lost to urban growth could release a lot of carbon currently stored in biomass. Urban growth, if occurring as forecast in our business-as-usual scenario, would destroy natural habitat that stores 4.35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of carbon dioxide emission from 931 million cars on the road for one year.

Cities will also be impacted by climate change in myriad ways, from hotter summer temperatures to more extreme rain events to sea level rise. In this report, we map where coastal natural habitats play a significant role in reducing coastal hazards during storms. In these stretches of coastline, we find that by 2030, urban area in these critical coastal zones could more than double to a total of 23,000 km2.

However, some of the dire predictions under our business-as-usual scenario need not happen. At the city level, the solution comes down to better planning and management of our urban growth. We advocate in the report for the incorporation of information on biodiversity and the benefits nature provides into urban planning decisions, to create a comprehensive vision of how nature can co-exist with and support cities—a greenprint for urban growth. Planning can protect biodiversity in natural habitats and maintain the health of our protected areas. Moreover, incorporating natural features, such as urban parks and street trees, into our cities will maximize the benefits that nature provides to people, from increased shade on a hot day to places to recreate and improve our physical and mental health.

Our report specifically focused on actions that national and international decision makers should take to protect nature. Local governments need to be better integrated into national planning decisions so that planning at each level incorporates the benefits of nature and reinforces decisions at other levels. International institutions have a role to play as well, in helping create the policies and provide the financial resources needed to implement many urban greenprints. Finally, the countries of the world need to begin discussing, within the Convention on Biological Diversity, how we can collectively work to make the urban century a positive one for the natural world.

The Nature in the Urban Century report was produced though the partnership of The Nature Conservancy, FutureEarth, The Stockholm Resilience Centre of Stockholm University, the Natural Capital Project, iDiv, The Nature of Cities, Urban Biodiversity Hub and ICLEI, including its Cities Biodiversity Center and the CitiesWithNature initiative.

The health of natural ecosystems is crucial to the health of cities and urban populations. From essential services like water purification, flood control and climate regulation to a range of physical and mental health benefits, societies thrive by building a strong connection to nature.

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem changes are a reality in our urban world. They have occurred more rapidly in the last half-century than any other time in human history as a result of urban sprawl, pollution and climate change. In our rapidly urbanizing world, nature is pushed increasingly to the periphery, often resulting in irreversible loss.

With urban areas at the center of our future, integrating nature into urban development and planning is crucial. Local and regional governments across the global ICLEI network are taking this forward. Through INTERACT-Bio, a four-year project in Brazil, India and Tanzania, nine cities are reshaping their current urban landscapes and development plans with nature. The project is designed to strengthen institutions and encourage integrated, interdisciplinary thinking and coordination across all levels of government and jurisdictional boundaries.

In Campinas, Brazil, for instance, city and ICLEI technical staff are supporting the preparation and implementation of a multifunctional nature connectivity area comprising all 20 municipalities within the metropolitan region. This is building on an already established program, which aims to recover and conserve regional fauna and flora through ecological corridors. Through a series of technical workshops, conferences and meetings, Campinas is also actively engaged in developing the regional urban development strategy, bringing a nature-based development lens to the conversation.

For more information on project cities and actions, take a look at the INTERACT-Bio newsletter or visit the project website.

Picture: Campinas’s downtown as seen from Torre do Castelo (‘Castle Tower’) belvedere.
© Fazousafreitas

On 20 June 2018, at the ICLEI World Congress in Montreal, Canada, three highly respected global organisations launched a unique initiative that recognizes and enhances the value of nature in and around cities across the world.

Called CitiesWithNature, this exciting initiative builds on previous international programs and significant experience and expertise of the founding partners – ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

CitiesWithNature is a global platform for cities and other subnational governments, their communities and experts to connect, share and learn from each other in mainstreaming nature into our cities in ways that benefit both people and nature.

“Now, more than ever, we need to reconnect with nature, to plan, build and manage our cities with nature! ICLEI and its partners are proud to present this shared global ambition, which aims to enable a growing number of cities and partners to come on board and collaborate,” says Councillor Cathy Oke, ICLEI’s incoming First Vice President. “I am also particularly excited that my city, Melbourne, has already joined CitiesWithNature as one of its pioneer cities.”

The initiative is open to all cities and subnational governments, regardless of size or level of progress in working with nature. It is structured in such a way that cities can decide how involved they want to be. The more actively they engage and contribute, the more benefits they will receive. There is no fee associated with joining CitiesWithNature. Initially, a commitment, along with some basic information, is all that is needed to register and start participating.

Each city that joins CitiesWithNature will be invited and assisted, through an online Registry, to share its policies, plans, commitments, actions and results related to nature and the services of ecosystems. This will become a powerful resource where cities can connect, share, learn from and inspire each other to accelerate actions and raise ambitions.

“Nature isn’t a luxury, it’s a critical piece of the solution as cities grow and face the impacts of a changing climate,” says Pascal Mittermaier, Global Managing Director for Cities at The Nature Conservancy. “Giving municipal leaders the tools they need to make the case for nature in their communities will help make cities greener, more resilient, truly thriving places for all of us.”

“Cities can benefit tremendously from strengthening the connection with their natural surroundings – this will improve quality of life, ensure the sustainable provision of food, energy and drinking water and create climate resilience. CitiesWithNature offers new opportunities to learn from the best experiences in the world to create cities that are in balance with nature,” says Chantal van Ham, EU Programme Manager Nature Based Solutions, IUCN.

The CitiesWithNature Knowledge and Research Hub will be a “meeting place” and online resource library for practitioners, researchers and other experts, both public and private, to engage and contribute to emerging practices and scientific thinking related to nature in, and surrounding, cities and other urban spaces.

The CitiesWithNature Community Hub will be co-created via social media. It will be open and freely available to anyone from any city in the world to share their experiences, photos, video clips and stories about nature in cities.

For more information and updates, please visit https://www.citieswithnature.org/ or follow on Twitter @CitiesWNature.

View our introductory video below or here (best viewed in HD).

The concept of ecosystem services or ‘nature’s benefits’ recognizes that the natural environment provides many critical and free services that contribute directly to human wellbeing and livelihoods. However, defining the spatial location of the areas that generate these benefits in order to mainstream them into planning frameworks remains a challenge in many cities of the global south.

The INTERACT-Bio project team used ‘natural asset mapping’ to identify and define the location of key ecosystem services in the nine project cities across Brazil, India and Tanzania. As a common baseline, high-resolution remotely sensed spatial data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 mission was captured during 2017 for each of the nine project cities. The project team worked closely with service providers GeoTerraImage to develop landcover classes that highlight areas which provide ecosystem services, such as wetlands, mangroves, grasslands and woody vegetation. This analysis resulted in a detailed spatial dataset that defines 12 different classes of landcover and can be used to generate a variety of mapping outputs and analytics for all three project countries.

In Tanzania, the ICLEI Africa INTERACT-Bio project team and UFZ technical support team worked closely with city partners to identify desired project outcomes as part of the project scoping exercise in 2017. A priority voiced by the Dar es Salaam city leadership was the need to identify and protect dwindling green open spaces within the city, to offset overexploitation of natural resources such as indigenous trees, and to mitigate some of the impacts of climate change such as the urban heat island effect.

To address this need, the INTERACT-Bio project team utilized a ‘thematic atlas’ approach to combine data and information generated from the remote natural asset mapping process with local spatial data, scientific studies and input from Tanzanian experts and city officials. The result, which is in the final stages of development, is a compendium of thematic maps and explanatory text that ‘make the case’ for the importance of green open space in Dar es Salaam. In addition to highlighting the status quo of ecosystem services in the city, the atlas provides good-practice policy responses and management interventions, towards aiding decision-makers in prolonging and maximising the benefits to citizens of green open spaces.

In line with their diverse contexts, the Brazilian and Indian INTERACT-Bio teams have adopted different spatial methodologies to mainstream biodiversity into planning and decision-making. These are however based on the same baseline methodology that was procured for natural asset mapping. This demonstrates the potential of combining customized earth observation data and information with input from local partners to aid city regions to make sustainable planning decisions.

Through co-production the thematic atlas on nature’s benefits, the INTERACT Bio project has produced a value-adding methodology and tool that can help cities make informed decisions about managing and investing in green open space and green and blue infrastructure. It can also help guide land use and development planning in a way that will enhance resilience and nature-based development. And it supports cities in building the case for investment in green space based on nature’s benefits (ecosystem services) and urban resilience considerations.

The INTERACT-Bio project is supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) through the International Climate Initiative (IKI).

Read more: www.international-climate-initiative.com