Efforts to combat climate change and biodiversity loss are inseparable as new mass extinction looms

How is it possible to separate the climate crisis from concerns over widespread habitat loss, species dying out and other aspects of biodiversity?

Our behaviour as a species could end up exterminating us rather than driving the rest of the natural world to mortal danger

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Maasai children run past a zebra that local residents said died due to drought, as they graze their cattle at Ilangeruani village, near Lake Magadi, in Kenya, on November 9. Kenyan authorities said the drought had killed hundreds of zebras among several other species in nine months. Photo: AP

David Dodwell

David Dodwell is a journalist focused on Hong Kong and China since the 1970s.

Published: 12:30am, 16 Jan 2023

Recently, I had a catch-up conversation on climate change and November’s UN climate change conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh with one of Hong Kong’s most conscientious students of the subject.

As we began to wind up, I asked what we should be taking away from the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal – confusingly called COP15 – that was held immediately after COP27. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “My brain has been too hard-pressed wrestling with COP27 to focus on the biodiversity stuff.”

I was not surprised given the awesome scope of rigorous scientific detail underpinning the international debate and the increasingly technical policy discussion over how to keep us from the brink of catastrophe as temperatures rise. At the same time, though, I was perplexed. How is it possible to separate the climate crisis and what some are calling “biological annihilation”, the threat of a sixth mass extinction or “bugpocalypse”.