By Carolyn Wincer, 2nd May 2022

In this article, Travelife for Accommodation discusses the relationship between biodiversity and climate change and suggests the types of actions that can be taken as part of your sustainability strategy.

Because the conversation around climate change is largely dominated by fossil fuels, many of the actions we take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are heavily focused on reducing our use of these fuels through changing our transportation and energy use habits. This is indeed a critical and urgent part of taking climate action, but to be really effective we need to take a more holistic approach by considering how we can all improve in other areas that have a big impact on climate change such as water, food and biodiversity, the latter of which we focus on in this article.

The relationship between climate change and biodiversity

By taking the right actions, and taking them swiftly, ecosystems can play an important role in both removing carbon from the atmosphere and mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events that we can expect to intensify as the climate destabilises. Below we have the ways that ecosystems can help us with climate change along with some suggestions about actions a business could take to support and encourage related biodiversity initiatives.

Carbon dioxide removal

Forests, wetlands, marshes and many other ecosystems do an excellent job of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the problem is that we are producing too much carbon dioxide for current ecosystems to process. Whilst this is a longer-term strategy and it would be much better for us to drastically reduce carbon emissions, planting and protecting ecosystems that process carbon dioxide is an important part of taking climate action.

Protection from climate events and rising sea levels

When it comes to protecting us from the impacts of climate change, again forests play a pivotal role by helping to prevent landslides and controlling water flows, whilst wetlands and flood plains in their natural state can help with both water flow during flood events, as well as maintaining good water quality. Mangroves play a critical role in coastal defence along with sand dunes and coastal wetlands.