Climate change and biodiversity loss are inseparable threats to humankind and must be addressed together. Nature-based solutions offer immediate and cost-effective benefits to both mitigate climate change and to adapt to its unavoidable effects. These solutions include:
- reducing deforestation and other land-use change and degradation;
- restoring degraded lands and ecosystems; and
- enhancing soil management in agricultural and range lands.
Biodiversity and ecosystems play an important role in strengthening the global response to climate change, while delivering multiple benefits. Better protection, management and restoration of natural and managed ecosystems can make significant contributions to the mitigation of human-induced climate change.
Ecosystem-based approaches can contribute significantly to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction thereby reducing the vulnerability of people, especially indigenous peoples and local communities and those disproportionately impacted, and the ecosystems upon which they depend, in the face of climate change.
Biodiversity conservation, the reduction of ecosystem degradation, and the restoration of ecosystems are examples of nature-based solutions that provide significant contributions to stabilizing warming to below 2°C, and closer to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, while delivering multiple co-benefits for biodiversity and sustainable development.