Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss are arguably the greatest challenges impeding the progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – collectively known as triple planetary crises. Avoiding climate change, halting, and reversing biodiversity loss, minimising pollution and ensuring human prosperity and wellbeing are four interlinked goals that governments aim to achieve by the first half of this century. This means the triple planetary crisis objectives must be pursued jointly and coherently in science and decision-making, to minimise trade-offs, maximise the positive impact and potentially deliver additional societal benefits. Failing to meet any of the goals impacts severely at scales that range from global to local. The role of biodiversity in human development and addressing climate change, and the need for synergy has been realised and recognized as a major contemporary global need.
The Hindu Kush Himalayan region (HKH), the highest and the most biodiverse region in the world, is also one of the most vulnerable mountain regions to climate change and biodiversity loss. Recognised as the ‘Third Pole’ and ‘Water Tower of Asia’ due to the largest mass of glaciers outside the North Pole and South Pole, and the region with four out of 36 Global Biodiversity Hotspots, the HKH is the most vulnerable to both climate change and biodiversity loss. It is evident that, due to elevation dependent warming, the HKH is witnessing a higher rise in temperature compared to the other mountain ranges and the global average with cascading impacts on biodiversity, water, people’s livelihood, and food security among others.
With an increasing realization to focus on coherence in approaches and developing strategic interventions on climate change and biodiversity through ‘connecting the dots, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) through its developing an umbrella programme document on issues related to science policy interfaces, policy coherence and governance through consultative process seeking inputs in designing interventions at global, regional, and national levels. UNEP, with a mandate to help strengthen science policy interfaces and support policy coherence for better environmental governance and management is partnering with International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), having mandate and expertise on climate change and biodiversity.
The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are the two most important global Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) contributing to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. There is a growing realisation that the contemporary twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss could be effectively overcome through synergy, using multipurpose solutions, which benefit both nature and people. The UNFCCC and the CBD, both agreed upon in Rio in 1992 and have considered biodiversity and climate change in their respective work programmes. There is a growing realisation that they can only be achieved through synergy, i.e., using solutions which benefit both nature and climate. The existing global mechanism such as Joint Liaison Group of UNFCCC, CBD and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and national mechanisms such as National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) guided by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), National Adaptation Plans (NAP) guided by the Paris Agreement could be instrumental in developing coherence among the two conventions to address the contemporary challenges faced by humanity.
