Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in this fourth podcast on biodiversity issues, entitled "Biodiversity responses, human well-being and climate change" explores how biodiversity loss and climate change, which are both having profound impacts on societies around the world, relate to each other, while focusing on the most important impacts of climate change and global warming on ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and living organisms. The importance of the Convention on Biological Diversity '30x30' target is also analysed while highlighting its potential future developments, e.g. the need of going beyond the traditional definition of a Protected Area, or actions and regulations for a more advanced protection of the natural capital of our Planet. LifeWatch ERIC will do its part to secure biodiversity, building on the web a research infrastructure open worldwide, providing tools and services for early career researchers, policy makers, citizens, in order to deepen our knowledge on how biodiversity is organised, maintained, can be restored or is expected to change, to address all the challenging issues we have at the moment.
Species are migrating due to climate change, changing their niches and and certain aspects of their life cycle, impacting food webs and key processes within ecosystems; above all, climate change and global warming are directly affecting individual metabolism and primary productivity and it is therefore expected to cause a loss of biomass in all regions all over the world (except in the Polar regions), affecting all kind of ecosystems and groups of species. Conserving and restoring natural spaces, both on land and in the water, will be essential for limiting carbon emissions and adapting to an already changing climate. In this sense, rewilding could be very important to foster biodiversity recovery and species’ recolonisation of ecosystems. However, rewilding also represents a risk: we could consider to solve the problem of biodiversity loss and act mitigating climate change impacts by rewilding ecosystems in western countries, and at the same time continue to destroy ecosystems all over in the tropical and equatorial latitudes.
We realise that climate change is occurring, we “feel the impacts of climate change, because we perceive climate change at a sensory level. Now, we must step forward and perceive that we are as far from sustainable development as we perceive that we are from climate balance.
