Highlights and images for 11 December 2024

Why would an assessment report on the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food, and health be considered so important, given that these individual elements are already addressed under dedicated processes?

Responding to this question, Co-Chair Paula Harrison highlighted that the Nexus Assessment is among the most ambitious work ever undertaken by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), “offering an unprecedented range of response options to move decisions and actions beyond single issue silos.” She added that “cascading crises can compound each other, but a nexus approach considers the interdependencies between these crises and offers holistic solutions.”

Want to dig deeper into today's talks? Read the full Earth Negotiations Bulletin daily report.

Many delegates underscored that the nexus approach reveals complementarities and trade-offs among response options and demonstrates how addressing one element can impact others – both positively and negatively. It further enables identifying and maximizing co-benefits for biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate systems, further addressing the cost of inaction and of not addressing multiple crises together.

Realizing the importance of the task at hand, delegates dived into the Nexus Assessment’s background messages, discussing, among other things, armed conflicts as indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, freshwater biodiversity, and the interlinkages between increases in food production and biodiversity loss.

With progress steady but slow, the Co-Chairs made the first appeals for increased efficiency. Some delegates emphasized that, at IPBES, authors “are the penholders” and governments “lend a hand,” while others underscored the intergovernmental nature of IPBES.

Other than developments related to the Nexus Assessment, the second day of IPBES 11 saw delegates working late into the night in two working groups to:

• initiate discussions on the thematic assessment of the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, determinants of transformative change and options for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity (Transformative Change Assessment);
• start deliberations on the scoping report for a second global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services;
• consider workplans for various objectives of the IPBES rolling work programme up to 2030; and
• discuss engagement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At the end of a busy day, most delegates seem to agree that significant concessions will need to be made to successfully tackle all items on the agenda of IPBES 11, and successfully conclude negotiations on the Nexus and Transformative Change Assessments.