Biodiversity Loss Is Crippling Nature's Adaptation To Climate Change

People often speak of climate change and biodiversity loss as separate disasters, even competing ones. The esteemed environmental journalist John Vidal recently detailed biodiversity loss in Huffington Post under a headline that called it "a crisis even bigger than climate change." But the two are inexorably linked, according to French and American scientists who convened in Chicago last week: climate change is reducing biodiversity, and biodiversity loss is crippling nature's ability to adapt to climate change.
Crippling adaptation is no trivial thing, according to Thierry Boulinier, research director of the Center for Functional & Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Montpellier, because adaptation is crucial to evolution.
"Diversity is important because it’s based on this diversity that you can have further evolution in case there are dramatic environmental changes," Boulinier said at a panel Wednesday hosted by the French Consulate and the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We can see that there are many documented environmental changes linked with human activities, and biodiversity will affect how the population and the ecosystem will respond. This is another aspect that maybe is a little bit overlooked, but it’s important to have this diversity."
Diversity within species is particularly vital, Boulinier said. A species may not yet be extinct, but without a diverse population of individuals, it will have less means to adapt.
UIC professor Moira Zellner sees the threat systemtically.
"Biodiversity and the increase in biodiversity is linked to complexity and it’s linked to the adaptive capacity of a system to sustain itself over long periods of time and to withstand disruption and stresses," Zellner said. "And if we don’t maintain that diversity and we don’t maintain that complexity, it starts to break down, and it starts to become a very fragile system."
An associate Professor of urban planning, Zellner sees the city as a natural phenomenon—as natural as an anthill or a termite nest, she said—and she reminded other scientists not to differentiate between humans and nature.
"We really cannot have lasting economic development without a healthy environment that provides healthy ecosystem services which are supported by biodiversity," she said.
Ecosystem services are essential functions nature provides, such as the pollination of agricultural crops.
"If we don’t have the biodiversity, those functions just don’t exist. These are vital to humans and their economies. So we can’t really divorce ourselves from a healthy environment."
The scientists gathered as part of the "French-American Climate Talks – Biodiversity" (FACT-B), a series of high-level conferences bringing together experts from France, the U.S,. and Canada. French scientists have been barnstorming North America in the wake of the staggering IPBES report that found extinctions accelerating and a million more species threatened. They're also touring to build support ahead of the August G7 Summit, where French President Emmanuel Macron will press leading developed nations to recognize biodiversity loss as a problem on the scale of climate change.
"FACT-B is part of France’s broader efforts to make biodiversity conservation a priority at the international level," according to the Office for Science & Technology of the Embassy of France in the United States, "in the same way as the fight against climate change."
At the panel in Chicago, the scientists compared the threats in orders of magnitude:
"One of the big drivers of what’s affecting both is that our climate is changing ten times more rapidly than nature tends to change the climate system," said Don Wuebbles, a UIC atmospheric scientist who has been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its first report in 1990. "So this is an extremely rapid change we’re seeing. It’s driven by human activities, the burning of fossil fuels and land-use change that are driving increases in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases and particles that affect our climate system."
But while the climate is changing 10 times faster than natural, extinctions are happening much faster than that:
"There has always been extinctions in the wild," said Cyrille Barnérias, the head of European and international affairs for the French Biodiversity Agency. "It's something normal. But we are doing it, I mean humans are doing it 100- to 1000-times faster than is the usual rate."