Connecting Global Priorities Biodiversity and Human Health

al. 2014), though advances in technology, prevention and treatment can combine to reduce the burden
of diseases like malaria (Feachem et al. 2010). Climate change directly contributes to damage of both
infrastructure and human settlements, resulting in human mortality and morbidity that includes the
mental health and well-being of survivors (IPCC 2014d). In countries at all stages of development, these
impacts are consistent with a lack of preparedness for climatic variability in some sectors; the most
salient manifestations will be among the poorest and most vulnerable populations (IPCC, 2014d).
Tertiary
The third – “tertiary impacts” – category is, by a number of magnitudes, the most important health
risk associated with climate change (Butler 2014b). These include the health impacts of large-scale
famine, forced migration and human conict, which result from the geophysical and ecological
consequences of climate change, including the alteration of ecosystems, sea-level rise, and longterm
disruptions in water supply and food production. Surprisingly, with rare exceptions, this group
of eects has been little mentioned in the intervening decades, including in the most recent IPCC
reports released in 2014. These must be considered more holistically as we prepare to embark upon
new global commitments on climate change and a post-2015 Development Agenda.
Many authors in this volume point to numerous
synergies (“co-benefits”) that could flow to both
human well-being and ecological “health” from a
more biosensitive approach to our relationship
with nature (Boyden 2004), such as the co-benefits
of cycling on both health and environment.
Awareness of these co-benefits may also accelerate
global social transformation (Haines et al. 2009;
Raskin et al. 2002). On the other hand, many
forms of inertia: social, institutional, technological
and perhaps, above all, climatological, slow and
impede the likelihood of a successful transition,
most notably an enormous countermovement,
funded and fuelled by vested interests profiting
from “environmental brinkmanship” (Butler
2000). Delay is also worsened by the scientific
knowledge gaps of many economists and policymakers,
who have been very slow to awaken to the
risks we face, and who are instead wedded to more
conservative or sectoral measures of progress, or
to the hope that technological innovation alone
will eventually solve the problem.
1.2 Vulnerability of biodiversity to
impacts of climate change
The earth’s biota was shaped by fluctuating
Pleistocene concentrations of atmospheric
carbon dioxide, temperature and precipitation;
it has undergone multiple evolutionary changes
and adopted natural adaptive strategies. Until
the advent of industrialization, changes in
climate occurred over an extended period of
time, in a landscape much less degraded and
fragmented than today, and with considerably
less – if any – pressure from anthropogenic
activity. Habitat fragmentation has confined
many species to relatively small areas within
their previous ranges, resulting in reduced genetic
variability (Parmesan and Matthews 2006) and
other changes to structure and composition (CBD
2009). Warming beyond the highest temperatures
reached during the Pleistocene will continue to
stress biodiversity and ecosystems far beyond
the levels imposed by the climatic changes that
occurred in the evolutionary past (Templeton et
al. 1990; Parmesan 2006).
The impacts of climate change on biodiversity
operate at different levels (including microbial,
individual, population, species, community,
ecosystem and biome), with variable responses
at each level (Bellard et al. 2012; Parmesan
and Martens 2009). For example, increased
temperatures coupled with decreases in the
distribution of precipitation may reduce
freshwater levels in lakes and rivers (Campbell
et al. 2009). Warmer temperatures cause fish
Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health
225