Healthy ecosystems deliver critical goods and services, such as providing food and fuel, or preventing floods and soil erosion. People depend on these goods and services for their wellbeing and livelihoods. However, because of climate change and other human impacts, many ecosystems have become degraded, with negative impacts on people’s lives.
Around the world, governments and communities are devising strategies for adapting to the negative impacts of climate change that are now seen as unavoidable. Adaptation strategies help society to plan better and minimise negative impacts, even turn new conditions to their advantage. Adaptation can take many forms: gathering information, drawing together role-players to plan for new climatic conditions, receiving early warning of disasters, or putting in place hard infrastructure. Another very important part of adaptation involves using nature to help adapt to climate change – often referred to as ecosystem-based adaptation or EBA.
EBA involves the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of an overall adaptation strategy to help people adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change. This means tackling problems with solutions based on nature – for example, keeping a wetland system in place as a natural “sponge” to absorb flash floods coming down from the mountains, in order to protect farmers’ fields. This could be an alternative to a solution based on engineering, such as directing the river through a concrete channel, which could be more costly and which would mean the precious water is lost out to sea.
