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Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss will generate potential losses of approximately 44 billion dollars (about half of the world’s GDP), associated with sectors that depend to some extent on nature. The consequences of the latter are increasingly serious: it affects soil and water, essential resources for agriculture and health; it generates imbalances in natural ecosystems, profoundly altering natural protection systems; it accelerates the proliferation of pests; and it increases CO₂ emissions, especially through deforestation.
To stop this situation, it is essential to develop robust scientific knowledge and, especially, to put it into practice, generating communication channels that allow the acceleration of the implementation of science-based policies that permeate national development agendas and business strategies. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) plays a fundamental role insofar as its objective is to create spaces for rapprochement between the scientific community and decision-makers, to create capacities and strengthen the use of science in the formulation of public policy.
However, in many cases scientific knowledge is insufficient due to the lack of adequate and standardized data, or because of the difficulty of transforming it into concrete projects that can be financed. Therefore, joint work with financial institutions that mobilize resources for biodiversity and that support investment decisions by governments and the private sector is key. This is especially important in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, where six of the seventeen most megadiverse countries in the world are located (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela) and which is home to between 60% and 70% of all known species, approximately 25% of tropical forests and the most biodiverse habitat in the world: the Amazon rainforest. According to IPBES data, terrestrial and coastal ecosystem services in the region are valued at 24.3 billion dollars per year.
To address this challenge, CAF, the development bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, is promoting meeting spaces between representatives of internationally renowned scientific institutions and other actors linked to research, in order to identify the barriers that science encounters in ensuring that knowledge is transferred to decision-making processes and what the role of multilateral banking should be, both to support the financial sustainability of scientific institutions in the region and to incorporate science-based solutions in their operations, thus contributing to a greater positioning of the voice of science in Latin America and the Caribbean in the global debate on biodiversity.
At CAF we are working to ensure that the region’s strategic ecosystems receive the necessary support to ensure the sustainability of their contributions to people’s lives, and we consider it essential that science underpins all our actions. We also want to give a voice to science, providing resources to cover the gaps that exist, promoting regional collaboration between scientific institutions and incorporating knowledge into our operations.
We need to implement innovative initiatives in ecosystems such as mangroves, the Amazon, the Caribbean, the biogeographic Chocó, Patagonia, the páramos or the Galapagos, ensuring that these solutions count on indigenous communities, which safeguard 80% of the world’s biodiversity.
We seek to give economic relevance to the ecosystem approach, which proposes the integrated management of land, water and living resources, recognizing that human beings are an essential part of ecosystems. This approach considers ecosystems as key instances for regional integration, reinforcing the vision of Latin America and the Caribbean as a region of solutions.
In the run-up to COP16 in Cali, scientific institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean must raise their voices, share their knowledge on biodiversity loss and identify research priorities to translate them into concrete actions.
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