Barriers and enablers to integrated management across the biodiversity-water-food-health-climate nexus in Southeast Asia

The recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Nexus Assessment evaluates the important interlinkages between biodiversity, food, health, water and climate change, showing that the world is facing interlinked crises that amplify one another and tackling them in separate silos has been ineffective and even counterproductive. The report also highlights a set of 71 “response options” which provide synergistic benefits across the five sectors. In this paper, we will examine nexus interlinkages and governance in several countries in Southeast Asia, and why siloed approaches continue to persist. Through collaborative research involving scientists across the US, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, this project is uncovering existing gaps in integrated sustainability planning, policy and strategies, as well as identifying promising cases of holistic management that need scaling out. We have engaged in policy mapping and interviews with decisionmakers (more than 100 decision-makers and related stakeholders (e.g., NGOs engaged with policymakers from 2020-2024) to understand the current landscape of nexus governance, including existing integration among sectors and current gaps.

In the presentation we will present findings from the policy mapping, specifically looking at the barriers and enablers of integrated policy to manage across biodiversity-water-food-health-climate. One key finding has been the divergent understanding of the concept of ecosystem services across decision-makers in multiple sectors. Rather than serving as a bridging concept that might contribute to integration of biodiversity with other sectors, our project has found that decisionmakers do not fully understand or use this concept, particularly in sectors like water, energy and finance. A lack of data availability, unfamiliarity with IPBES and its work, and lack of stakeholder involvement in ecosystem services assessments were all identified as key gaps that future science-policy interfaces in Southeast Asia could address. Our paper will also discuss what some possible alternative bridging concepts might be, and how decision-support tool developments might aid sectoral integration and biodiversity mainstreaming.