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Ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation: progress and challenges

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Abstract

Resilient ecosystems are vital to human well-being and are increasingly recognised as critical to supporting communities’ efforts to adapt to climate change. The governing bodies of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are encouraging parties to adopt ‘ecosystem-based adaptation’ (EbA) approaches, which utilise biodiversity and ecosystem services to support climate change adaptation. These approaches are wide ranging and include mangrove restoration to buffer against storm surges; watershed management to protect against droughts and floods; rangeland management to prevent desertification; and sustainable management of fisheries and forests to ensure food security. This article examines the emergence of EbA in international legal frameworks for climate change and biodiversity and progress towards implementation. The EbA concept is potentially powerful in catalysing international and national commitments to act due to its key defining features of a focus on societal adaptation rather than ecocentricism, and a targeting of the immediate adaptation needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities who are adversely affected by climate change. However, examination of national policy and practice in two least developed countries, Samoa and Cambodia, reveals that institutional and legal barriers at national level can pose significant challenges to operationalising EbA to achieve adaptation objectives.

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Notes

  1. There are limited references to biodiversity in the UNFCCC and no explicit reference to climate change in the CBD. However, more recently at CBD COP-10 the Joint Liaison Group nominated ecosystem-based approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation as a joint activity. The CBD's 2nd Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Biodiversity and Climate Change has also explored the interconnectedness between climate change and biodiversity. Furthermore, the UNFCCC's Nairobi work programme, technical workshops on EbA have recently occurred.

  2. For reasons of scope, this article analyses the UNFCCC and the CBD. Other international biodiversity environmental regimes also promote and enable EbA; see, eg, the Ramsar Convention.

  3. Parties negotiating the Kyoto Protocol were concerned that attention on adaptation would detract from the pressing need for mitigation.

  4. It was not until 2007 at UNFCCC COP-13 that adaptation was clearly highlighted as a priority.

  5. UNFCCC mechanisms account for about 10 % of total international transfers for adaptation, the remainder provided through official development assistance.

  6. These measures include reducing fragmentation of habitat to enable species to migrate with changing climates.

  7. However, the CBD has had greater success in achieving progress towards access and benefit-sharing goals.

  8. Aichi Bioidiversity Target 11: “By 2020, at least 17 % of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 % of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes and seascapes”.

  9. Over the last three decades, various anthropogenic pressures have resulted in the lost of more than 95 % of the lake’s flooded forest cover, which are the breeding and feeding grounds for fish and other species.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Emeritus Professor Ben Boer, Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law at the University of Sydney, for his insights and comments during the development of this article; and Robert Munroe, BirdLife International, for discussing recent developments.

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  1. Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Joanne Chong

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Chong, J. Ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation: progress and challenges. Int Environ Agreements 14, 391–405 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9242-9

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