Making Copenhagen count

Climate change and biodiversity

I was lucky enough to sneak into a session at Forest Day 3 where they were discussing climate change and biodiversity.

Orang-utan

Dr Ian Noble from the World Bank suggested “Climate change is and will continue to be one of the dominant drivers of biodiversity loss”

He also said “REDD has the potential to deliver co-benefits for forest biodiversity if we recognise the contribution of diverse forests, respect indigenous and local peoples and address forest governance issues”

“Maintaining biodiversity and setting up monitoring systems to reduce threats is key,” said Natasha Calderwood, Program Coordinator, FFI-Macquarie Taskforce.

“The co-benefits for wider ecosystem services include things like watershed protection and preventing soil erosion.”

World forest ecosystems provide a range of environmental services that directly or indirectly benefit all humans and forest ecological sustainability and resilience depends strongly on biodiversity.

It is key, therefore, that efforts to reduce emission from deforestation take biodiversity conservation into consideration as this will help maintain fully functional and resilient forest ecosystems as well as the long term stability of the carbon pool.

Nicaraguan dry forest