The relationship between climate change and biodiversity loss is profound. Climate change accelerates biodiversity decline: Rapid climate shifts challenge species’ adaptability and contribute to biodiversity loss. Species extinction or migration disrupt ecosystems, impacting water sources, triggering crop failures, vulnerability to extreme weather events, endangering communities. Biodiversity loss also intensifies climate breakdown: Large-scale agriculture, urban expansion, and industry convert vital ecosystems like wetlands and forests, elevating greenhouse gas emissions. This undermines carbon absorption, weakens Earth’s cooling capacity and impairs adaptation. These intertwined crises jeopardize food, water, living conditions, and human health. Currently, governments’ commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement are nowhere near levels needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
Similarly, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in December 2022 has a steep task of halting mass extinctions. But climate–biodiversity interdependence is also a source of hope. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems is fundamental to climate-resilient development and mitigation. This is at the core of nature-based climate actions (NBCAs), this project’s key concept. This concept brings together growing interest in the broad Nature-based Solutions (NbS) approach, and in collaborative climate actions by non-state and subnational actors for the implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement. Examples of NBCAs include establishing protected areas for forest, aquatic and marine ecosystems (e.g. protected watersheds, mangrove forests) and restoring and rewilding degraded ecosystems. NBCAs promise important co-benefits to human health and livelihoods, including enhanced food security, access to traditional knowledge, recreation and tourism. NBCAs are undertaken around the world through collaborations of cities, regional authorities, businesses, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, Indigenous Peoples and networks.
While not the sole solution, NBCAs are potent approaches that cannot be ignored. While NBCAs are powerful, they are not always straightforward. When badly designed, they can harm biodiversity and people. Some climate change mitigation strategies—on land, freshwater, or marine areas—hinder biodiversity objectives. Hasty carbon-focused tree-planting and monocultures can weaken local biodiversity. Hydropower schemes may negatively affect aquatic biodiversity and have severe negative social impacts. Rapid environmental shifts make predicting and managing conservation and restoration outcomes more challenging. The rush for rapid action can obscure considerations of equity, inclusion, and the rights of communities most at risk. Furthermore, NBCAs demand well-coordinated collaboration among diverse actors, often across boundaries. Typically small in scale, NBCAs are nowhere near the scale and urgency of climate and biodiversity crises and chronically underfunded, as with conservation globally. The overlooked component: To mobilize credible actions by cities, businesses, NGOs, and networks for climate adaptation and mitigation, global institutions have established frameworks such as the Race to Zero Expert Group and the UN High-Level Expert Group. While beginning to highlight biodiversity integration, their calls to action remain broad and disconnected from local communities and Indigenous Peoples. We know little about NBCAs globally (e.g., their distribution, patterns, and performance) and much less about optimal NBCA deployment with equitable collaboration among diverse actors for context-relevant actions or how to assess their progress. This constrains the scaling-up of NBCAs and limits evidence-based policy recommendations for effective funding flow to local actors that could deliver these outcomes.
The overarching goal for this consortium project — which we call BioCAM4 — is to develop methodologies for mapping NBCA trends worldwide and assessing local opportunities and challenges for NBCAs with dedicated deep-dive studies in two world regions: East Africa and Central America. Interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research will strengthen capacity for NBCAs promising to address the following three key climate-related risks, which affect vulnerable communities in biodiversity rich areas whose livelihoods depend on the local environment.
Integrating mixed, participatory methods with a custom interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral approach, BioCAM4 will achieve its overarching goal via three specific objectives: 1. Global mapping and analysis: A comprehensive global mapping and analysis of NBCAs will be co-produced by social scientists, biologists, and stakeholders. The resulting open-access database will offer insights on global NBCA distribution, patterns, and performance. 2. Context-specific exploration of action situations for NBCAs in focus areas in the Global South: We will complement the global analysis with deep-dive studies that engage stakeholders and communities in four countries: Rwanda (Virunga region) and Kenya (Lake Victoria region) in East Africa, Costa Rica (Brunca region) and Guatemala (Trifinio Region) in Central America. The vulnerable groups for BioCAM4 are communities surrounding conservation and restoration sites in the above regional focus areas. We understand vulnerability in terms of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. The communities in the focus areas are among the most affected by climate impacts, least responsible for it, and have reduced adaptive capacity due to social-economic fragility.
We will explore existing and potential NBCAs in focus areas, identifying facilitating and hindering factors, to understand their outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Participatory design with practitioners, social scientists, vulnerable populations, and local and regional research end-users in our focus areas will engage local actors to implement effective and inclusive NBCAs, while providing bottom-up insights for improving indicators for tracking outcomes and impacts for the global database. Ethicists and biologists will support integration of justice principles and sound conservation science and social science perspectives with attention to local relevance. Research translation and policy guidance: Leveraging community-based and international partnerships, science-policy specialists with expertise in biology, political science and science diplomacy will translate research insights from both global and local analyses into actionable recommendations for growing and scaling-up NBCAs. These recommendations will guide implementers (local authorities, governments, UN Climate Change, and UN Biodiversity processes) and global funders (Global Environment Facility, Green Climate Fund) to direct funding and resources effectively toward NBCAs, and enhance capacity at community level.
About the BioCAM4 Mini-grants
BioCAM4 research comprises three work packages. Specifically, Work Package 2 relates to the context-specific explorations of local action situations through deep-dive studies. The project will conduct deep-dive studies in selected focus areas to probe socio-ecological factors influencing decision-making and implementation of NBCAs. Using participatory and mixed methodologies the deep dives will be co-created with vulnerable communities and regional stakeholders, and Indigenous Peoples. Our approach draws from the Networks of Actions Situations (NAS) method, which expanded upon the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. This adapted NAS framework reveals context-specific drivers and outcomes of local decision-making on natural resource use, as evidenced in prior studies on groundwater overuse, and the water-energy-food nexus. The NAS framework will uncover how biophysical, cultural and institutional factors affect community action for implementing NBCAs in the study regions, understand action situations and actor interactions therein, and their outputs, outcomes, and impacts. We will concurrently unpack ethics, equity, inclusivity and human rights principles in the design, implementation, analyses of NBCAs, generating insights for their integration in decision-making.
Deep-dive studies will: (1) co-design a method for monitoring drivers and outcomes, (2) assess jointly with stakeholders whether NBCAs produce ecosystem-service outcomes that mitigate risks to ecosystems, livelihoods, and human health, (3) identify drivers that hinder or foster outcomes (behavioral changes) and impacts (long-term changes). The participatory bottom-up approach will (4) concurrently co-create capacity-strengthening and training for NBCAs; and (5) improve indicators for global NBCA assessment beyond inputs and outputs towards gauging outcomes and impacts across ecological, livelihood, and health indicators.
Thus, the deep-dives will contribute to improving data collection and enhance the progress assessment framework, providing comprehensive data and analysis from input through to impact. Concurrently, multi-level governance analyses will advance understanding of the global governance and initiatives that affect local NBCAs (or not) and the respective insights will inform policy guidance for global actors as described below.
The deep-dive studies will be funded. A call for application for mini-grants to conduct the deep-dive studies of this project is coming soon. For more information on the project please see this link.