World Economic Forum highlights diversity as a key resilience strategy for future shocks
Wednesday, 2018/02/14 | 06:36:58
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CGIAR; 02 Feb 2018
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a Swiss-based foundation committed to improving the state of the world. Every year the foremost political, business and other leaders of society meet in Davos to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Since 2005, the Forum has released a yearly Global Risks Report, which analyses the evolution and intensity of global risks.
Ann Tutwiler, Director General, Bioversity International, reflects on how agricultural biodiversity can mitigate these risks and enhance resilience in her latest blog.
Environmental risks topped the charts in this year’s Global Risks Report published last week by the World Economic Forum. Hundreds of global leaders from business, government and non-governmental organizations around the world agree that environmental risks are the most dangerous risks facing the world (The Global Risks Landscape 2018). The top five environmental risks – extreme weather events, natural disasters, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and man-made environmental disasters – are not only highly likely to occur, they are highly likely to have a devastating impact if they do occur.
However, these are not separate and individualized risks; they exacerbate and compound each other.
Reducing hunger by intensifying and modernizing agriculture has contributed to man-made disasters, such as climate change, soil depletion, nitrogen loading and deforestation. These in turn trigger extreme weather events, such as the increased incidence of high temperatures and category five hurricanes.
The Global Risks Report’s map of these interconnections illustrates the strong feedback loops biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, food crises, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation and extreme weather events. These in turn drive large-scale involuntary migration and to profound social instability. Yet, the latter, with hardly a mention of the former, dominate today’s political debates.
When I look at the Global Risks Interconnections Map, the common thread is our agricultural and food systems, which both contribute to these risks but are also vulnerable to them. What is startling is that the World Economic Forum report recognizes that the traditional advice to diversify our financial portfolios applies not just to saving for retirement, it also applies to saving the planet. You would never invest all your retirement savings in just one bond or one company’s stock, so why are our food systems invested in such a narrow slice of the available diversity. There are over 5,000 plant species and 40 animal species documented as human food, but we rely on 3 crops for over half our plant based calories, and a mere 12 crops and five animal species for three quarters of our food supply. It is a risky investment strategy indeed.
Diversity and resilience is the core of Bioversity International’s research agenda. Our research demonstrates that agricultural and tree biodiversity are essential to addressing food insecurity, climate change, extreme weather and ecosystem collapse. Four solutions in one!
Let me give you a few examples of what we are learning about the diversity effect:
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