Can the planetary health concept save freshwater biodiversity and ecosystems?
Cross-scale collaboration can better align policies to address freshwater biodiversity loss, but stronger watershed monitoring and local capacity are essential to define limits, guide interventions, and apply concepts like planetary boundaries effectively.
Subject Tags
- Biodiversity
- Ecosystem management
- Large scale protection
Abstract
Working across spatial and institutional scales provides opportunity for bottom-up and top-down efforts to advance cross-scale coherence in policy and action. These integrative actions have a strong chance of truly reversing the freshwater biodiversity crisis for people and the planet. But a crucial part of any large-scale approach to planetary health of freshwater ecosystems includes ensuring that nations and regions have the capacity to conduct their own monitoring at the watershed scale and understand the ecological limits of their basins, so they can define their local safe operating space. Such monitoring has been lacking for freshwater biodiversity despite their relevance to the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) processes. These assessments would also serve as a baseline for monitoring and understanding the limits needed to identify interventions that will bend the curve for freshwater biodiversity. More work is sorely needed on how to implement those concepts and ideas in practice—something that we hope will be the outcome of this Comment. Moreover, we also hope that this Comment will stimulate additional discourse around the roles of planetary boundaries and health as concepts that can be applied to the freshwater biodiversity crisis.
Citation
Cooke, S.J., Lynch, A.J., Tickner, D., Abell, R., Dalu, T., Fiorella, K.J., Raghavan, R., Harrison, I.J., Jähnig, S.C., Vollmer, D. and Carpenter, S., 2024. Can the planetary health concept save freshwater biodiversity and ecosystems?. The Lancet Planetary Health, 8(1), pp.e2-e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00275-9
TNC Authors
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Robin Abell
Durable Freshwater Protection Director
The Nature Conservancy
Email: robin.abell@tnc.org