"Climate protection also has something to do with creation." To speak from the pulpit, as was recently experienced in its purest form in a promotional film at the beginning of the CDU Future Congress, is the environmental policy common sense of the past decades.
Just like the following sentence that climate protection also has a lot to do with freedom. Both are true, but both hardly correspond to the reality of environmental policy. After all, what politicians are doing, both in climate protection and in the goal of preserving biodiversity, which is recorded as "creation", has hardly helped to stop the ecological downward trend, even after decades of rhetorical attempts at rapprochement and numerous party programmes.
The problems are piling up. So keep up the good work? Or is there a chance to turn the tide in time before the crises turn into a double catastrophe and everyone will feel it? And what could this way out of the global double crisis look like?
In the journal "Science", science recently dared to make a new foray. An international group of researchers led by German climate researchers and ecologists wants to achieve something that everyone has failed to do so far – environmental policy, but also science itself, namely to bring together climate and biodiversity policy. To negotiate both together and thus solve both at the same time. On thirteen pages, the scientists complain that in dealing with global warming and the unprecedentedly rapid disappearance of species from our planet, it has still not been understood how closely linked the loss of biodiversity with climate change really is. And, above all, how these ever more rapidly deepening crises are sweeping our society away.
"The window closes quickly"
Is that too much pessimism? Some may actually rub their eyes: Wasn't the agreement reached by the international community in Montreal for more resolute biodiversity conservation just a few months ago celebrated as a huge success? Celebrated as a "Paris moment" for nature conservation, because the agreements on climate protection reached in Paris in 2015 were also intended to finally end the planetary malaise. In their analysis, the scientists led by climate researcher Hans-Otto Pörtner from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven soberly conclude that nothing is solved until both are solved together. "The window continues to close rapidly," they write. Pörtner chaired the first joint meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It is the basis of the "Science" paper, and it was also designed as an attempt to merge the two most important environmental treaties in UN history, so to speak, and thus to lend more political weight to the largely unnoticed mass extinction of species.
Such attempts to negotiate biodiversity and climate diplomatically together have occurred time and again, especially behind the scenes. They have all silted up so far. This is certainly why the article in "Science" tries another, as it is called, "nexus". The solution to the two ecological megacrises is to be closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Ergo: with the progress goals of the peoples and thus also with our safeguarding of prosperity.
So the crisis bracket is: sustainability. Incentives must be created and "positive social tipping points" must be created. Basically, the message should be: Everyone benefits when ecological peace prevails, when further ecocide is prevented and the climate is balanced. Positive psychology, that's enough? Following the publication of the OECD Environmental Review Report this week, Brigitte Knopf, a member of the Expert Council on Climate Change, pointed out that, unlike in other environmental areas, the German state does not generate any revenue from environmental taxes through biodiversity conservation. In other words, here, too, an obvious disdain for mass extinction. In any case, the universally necessary rethinking and pivoting, the mobilization of the masses, the scientists write, is something "that has never been attempted before." I guess you can say that. However, it is preached again and again.