Climate Change, Water and Healthy Ecosystems

As we approach the Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen (COP-15) it is quite worrying to see how silo-thinking among the global environment conventions seem to be a barrier to finding cross-cutting solutions to the global environmental problems. The word ‘water’ is still not to be found in the negotiation text for COP-15, although climate change hits the environment and livelihoods primarily through the water medium. At UDC we find that water and ecosystems had deserved more visibility in the CC negotiations.

Livelihoods depend on healthy ecosystems through the services they provide to local communities, and several of these services are related to buffering adverse impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts, see level rise and storms. Ecosystems and the water medium constitute the life support system of the planet and both need to be included in the agreed solution to the climate change threat. There are significant co-benefits of better ecosystem management in terms of mitigation potential through carbon sequestration. This has been fully recognized in the field of forestry (REDD) but still needs to be explored for other types of ecosystems.

Peter Koefoed Bjornsen, PhD
Director UDC,  UNEP-DHI Centre for Water and Environment