Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
The state of biodiversity is at a critical crossroads as 2024 comes to an end. Nature in all its gifts provides the basic elements on which all life depends: clean air, temperature control, fertile soil, and clean water. Too few people, though, seem to grasp the centrality of protecting and restoring nature and biodiversity.
The climate crisis has damaged the planet’s ecosystems — it has altered where species live, how they interact, and the timing of biological events, which could fundamentally transform current ecosystems and food webs. No longer do ecosystems have their same capacity to mitigate extreme events and disturbance, such as wildfires, floods, and drought, as they had centuries ago.
The impacts of the global economy continue to destroy nature.
- 32% of the world’s forest area has been lost, transforming carbon sinks into carbon producers.
- 50% of coral reef systems have been decimated, affecting local food sources and livelihoods.
- 85% of wetlands have been reconfigured for agriculture or built structures, eliminating these important carbon storage areas.
The efforts to protect and encourage biodiversity face massive funding gaps, estimated at over $711 billion annually up to 2030. Then again, many advocates have come together to tackle the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, knowing that solutions are possible when communities, partners, and supporters rally to pursue system environmental change.
Memorable Moments for Ecosystems in 2024
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which underpins the global environmental movement, has achieved some real successes in 2024. Let’s take a moment to appreciate progress toward recognizing the important role that biodiversity has and how radical change in how we view nature needs to take place if we are to maintain a thriving planet.
As the sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) closed, 15 resolutions designed to protect the planet were agreed upon, including reining in pollution from chemicals, combating desertification, protecting the ocean, reducing air pollution, and better managing freshwater supplies.
Seven landmark initiatives that are reviving the natural world, from Pakistan to Peru, are expected to restore 40 million hectares of landscapes and seascapes and create 500,000 jobs.
China and UNEP launched the Kunming Biodiversity Fund, which is designed to support conservation-related projects around the world and support the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a landmark 2022 deal to halt and reverse nature loss.
World leaders adopted the Pact for the Future, a ground-breaking international agreement designed to lay the foundation for a just, sustainable, and peaceful global order and which features environmental policy initiatives prominently. It emphasizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels, curtail plastic and chemical pollution, and safeguard biodiversity.
At a UN conference to combat desertification, countries agreed to commit $12 billion to restoring land and improving drought resilience while promising to ramp public and private financing for 80 drought-wracked nations.
Should the State of Biodiversity be Boiled down to a Business Concern?
The natural world is priceless. A vigorous state of biodiversity is necessary for the gestalt of entire ecosystems. Approximately half of the world’s GDP depends moderately or highly on nature, and without which it would be impossible to sustain the other half. Every company relies on a workforce dependent on access to clean air and water.
Four major value chains — food, energy, infrastructure, and fashion — drive more than 90% of human-caused pressure on global biodiversity. Nature loss can make resources scarce and create socioeconomic instability, disrupting the communities and markets in which companies operate.
The business risks of a loss of biodiversity and nature are tangible and severe, including rising commodity prices, job losses, and resource shortages such as disruption to access to critical minerals and metals. The hazards to humanity are broader: losing habitat, landscape, and species compromises water supply and quality, food supplies, and more, could force migrations of animals and citizens and potentially threaten economic development, trade agreements, equality efforts, and peace between nations.
In our largely capitalistic world, biodiversity’s best chance is for business leaders to frame its ongoing vitality as a profitability issue. In this sense, aligning strategy and priorities to make preserving and restoring nature are part of doing business — a way to address nature’s condition as central to how society functions and businesses operate. It coalesces human capital (health, knowledge, and skills) with and economic contexts (roads, buildings, and factories) and blends the best of both to enhance the state of biodiversity and the health of business.
Some private and public sector C-suite upper echelon have recognized the climate crisis as a bottom line issue, helped along with targeted marketing, government incentives, and sustainability reporting.
Deloitte concludes that, if the business world pivots its efforts to nature-positive business models now, it could create 395 million jobs by 2030 and $10 trillion of global GDP growth. Unfortunately, there is a $711 billion average annual funding gap between what analysts estimate the world needs to spend to reverse biodiversity loss and what it will actually spend per year from 2020 to 2030. Deloitte breaks down the types of ecosystem services that nature provides to the economy and society can be largely categorized into four types.
- Provisioning: Nature gives humans ways to keep themselves fed, clothed, and sheltered.
- Regulating: Nature does many things to make our planet livable, from holding back storm surges to capturing carbon and filtering air and water.
- Cultural: Nature plays a central role in religious and spiritual traditions.
- Supporting services: Nature provides the building blocks of biology, physics, and chemistry — and the processes and institutions built on them.
Together, the three largest sectors that are highly dependent on nature — construction, agriculture, and food and beverages — generate close to $8 trillion of gross value added; other critical sectors include forestry, fisheries, energy, water, and outdoor recreation.
The agriculture industry’s reliance on pollination, soil quality, and fertilizer, is all threatened by environmental degradation. Shifting consumer preferences and better managing food supply can improve dietary choices, reduce post-harvest losses, and reduce food waste, contributing to eradicating poverty and eliminating hunger while promoting good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation, and climate action.
Nature tech encompasses any technology that can be applied to enable, accelerate, and scale up nature-based solutions. The current nature tech market size is approximately $2 billion and is estimated to triple over the next decade. Though still comparatively small, the emerging nature tech could help create trust to adequately fund nature-based solutions and help close the massive funding gap between what’s needed and what’s currently available.
Such commitments promote responsibility and compassion for ecosystem conservation and species discovery and draw attention to the delicate balance that is so crucial to protecting our planet’s diverse natural wealth.
Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
