Nele Marien is Forests & Biodiversity International Programme Coordinator for Friends of the Earth International. 

As we celebrate Earth Day – and with the UN COP30 climate summit in sight – we are simultaneously witnessing the widespread and devastating effects of the climate and biodiversity crises.

A new report, Climate and Biodiversity in Freefall, published by Friends of the Earth International, demonstrates how these crises are intertwined and rooted in the same systems. It has now become increasingly clear that what we need is real system change that focuses on the root causes, challenges and existing power relationships, and dismantles all forms of oppression and exploitation. 

Understanding the connection  

Intrinsically linked, climate change and the biodiversity crisis stem from the same economic, social and political systems that prioritise maximising profits over people and the planet and reward exploitation – and they exacerbate one another.   

Roughly 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as rising temperatures and the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events wreak havoc on habitats, ecosystems and communities.  

It goes both ways: biodiversity loss is also taking a major toll on climate stability. As ecosystems lose biomass – the sum of all living organisms –  the diversity among species declines.

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Deforestation and soil degradation from industrial agriculture and other extractive industries have drastically reduced the total amount of carbon stored in biomass. For example, the Amazon is fast approaching a tipping point where forests may turn from carbon sinks into carbon sources with irreversible and catastrophic climate impacts.

Carbon and biodiversity offsetting do nothing to reverse the drivers of this carbon and biomass loss and can never be solutions to the climate or biodiversity crisis.  

Tackling these major challenges requires a holistic approach. Yet, the current policy responses are only pushing us further toward an impasse.  

The perils of poor climate policies 

International climate policies that advance false solutions are failing to address these crises and aggravate this negative feedback loop.

Biofuels, for example, pushed as a so-called “solution” to replace fossil fuels and fuel cars, have gained strong popularity in recent years, although they raise serious concerns: their production creates fierce competition for land between energy crops and food production and drastically reduces the availability of arable land for food production. This often results in even more deforestation and land grabs, disproportionately affecting Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food producers, threatening their lives and livelihoods and erasing ancestral knowledge.

Carbon offsets based on carbon stored in forests, such as REDD+ and “nature-based solutions” have also taken off, despite their unrealistic land requirements, to supposedly compensate for ongoing fossil fuel emissions. These offsets are based on the idea that not destroying nature, and therefore avoiding the release of more carbon into the atmosphere, gives the right to emit more elsewhere. This implies locking in the amount of emissions avoided – and it leads to the same nature being under threat from climate change, instead of compensating for it.&