Groundbreaking assessment highlights the importance of an integrated approach to climate change, biodiversity, food, water, and human health

The IPBES Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health (and Climate) – known as the Nexus Report – was officially approved by 147 countries on 16 December 2024. This milestone marks the culmination of efforts to which the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, and before it the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE), have contributed substantially since 2019. The assessment focuses on more than 70 solutions available to policy makers, including managing ecosystem function in agricultural landscapes; reducing nutrient, plastic, and pesticide pollution; and shifting to sustainable healthy diets. The authors stress that in this time of triple planetary crises – environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and public health – urgent and ambitious actions are critical to implementing and scaling the proposed solutions.

In this blog, Dr Fabrice DeClerck, Chief Science Officer at EAT and Contributing Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), answers questions about the assessment and its significance.

What is IPBES and why is the Nexus Assessment important?

IPBES is the sister organization of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It focuses on the vital contributions that nature makes to people, also known as ecosystem services. Comprising 147 governments, IPBES reports are co-produced through collaboration between scientific experts and national governments. Like IPCC, IPBES represents one of the most direct avenues for science to engage with policy.

What does the Nexus Assessment cover and how was it developed?

The Nexus Assessment covers the interactions between biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate. Many global assessments focus on describing the current state of these areas individually (e.g. just food or just biodiversity). The Nexus Assessment, however, for the first time, proposes a broad set of solutions which have been assessed for their impact across all five domains.

The assessment has four major sections. The first chapter reminds us that we are in a poly-crisis situation regarding the loss of biodiversity and its contributions to human well-being, climate and water regulation, food production, and health.  These challenges are interlinked and so solutions must be as well. The second chapter is an analysis of multiple global scenarios which confirms that ‘business as usual’ poses significant challenges across all five nexus elements; that prioritizing one nexus element over another can provide some solutions, but in most cases aggravates another element; and most critically, that nexus solutions in contrast, are able to provide options that, while including some trade-offs, provide improvements across all five elements. The third chapter evaluates more than 70 solutions and finds that applying solutions in bundles rather than singly results in significant increases in efficiency with important cost reductions. For example, aligning agricultural policy with the promotion of healthy diets would permit the repurposing of agricultural subsidies to continue supporting  farmers, while simultaneously reducing escalating public investments in healthcare. The final chapter provides an eight-step process for identifying and implementing nexus solutions with a focus on adaptation to local contexts and fostering greater cooperation.

What was the CGIAR contribution?

CGIAR played a crucial role in the Nexus Assessment from its inception. In 2019, when calls for ideas were shared by IPBES, WLE proposed that the Nexus Assessment should have a very strong focus on the interconnections between biodiversity, food, and health. In that proposal, we emphasized that how food is produced, what foods are produced, and where they are produced all have strong interconnected interactions with water and climate.

I was honored to serve as the Coordinating Lead Author of the Assessment alongside Edmundo Barrios, a former CGIAR scientist now with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The five nexus chapters were led by Mario Herrero, also a former CGIAR scientist.

What are some of the integrated solutions covered in the assessment?  

While new technologies and innovations will be important, there are immediate gains and impacts to be made by applying existing solutions in a more integrated manner. Major solution sets covered by the assessment include: halting the conversion of remaining intact ecosystems – which is fundamentally dependent on a more productive agricultural sector; restoration of degraded lands – including recovering production potential; better management of ecological functions in agricultural landscapes through sustainable and ecological intensification (a major domain of CGIAR’s work); reducing nutrient and pesticide pollution from agriculture; and shifting to healthy diets, which is an opportunity for those of us working in the production sector to rethink which crops we are focusing on and how we might contribute to making under-consumed healthy foods more available, affordable, and desirable. The assessment also recognizes the importance of social sciences with gender-based approaches, a greater focus on land tenure, and gaining inspiration from Indigenous systems and local practices.

What does IPBES hope to achieve by publishing the Nexus Assessment?

IPBES hopes to fundamentally shift the narrative on biodiversity – from biodiversity as something to be preserved in protected areas, to biodiversity being the fabric of life – emphasizing that living in harmony with nature is a critical goal for all of us to strive for. Also, IPBES, through this assessment, is highlighting the need for collaboration across domains, and the urgent need to shift from simply describing challenges to actively understanding, celebrating, and scaling solutions. This must be done with urgency, at a pace and scale that matches the magnitude and severity of the multiple crises we are facing.

For more information, see the IPBES media release: https://www.ipbes.net/node/85582

Header image: Participants gather for the media launch of the IPBES Nexus Assessment on 17 December 2024. Photo by IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth.