Seite - 319 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

319 was updated in 2014 (WHO 2015).1 In 2015, the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change prominently recommended ten concise policy actions for the next 5  years on climate change adaptation to protect public health (Watts et  al. 2015), which urged joint working across sectors and scaling up of investments to secure a climate-resilient public health system. Human health was also included as an impor- tant aspect in the European Environment Agency indicator report on climate change (Füssel et  al. 2017). International policy commitments were documented in the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which recognised “the social, economic and environmental value of voluntary mitigation actions and their co-benefits for adaptation, health and sustain- able development”(UN 2015a). Unfortunately, the interlinkages between climate change, health and biodiver- sity only gained little attention within international climate policy, so far. 14.5 Biodiversity–Climate–Health Nexus Despite the many activities in the individual fields of biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as the improvement of human health, the benefits that intact ecosystems can provide to people’s health in the face of climate change has only been recognised slowly during the last decade. There are many opportunities to bring the three topics of biodiversity, health and climate together in a constructive way and to tackle real issues. Biodiversity can help to prevent or minimise human-induced or natural disasters that are caused or acceler- ated by climate change. For example: 1. Biodiversity can help human societies to adapt better to climate change  induced heat  waves in urban areas (see Lindley Chap. 1, this volume; overviews in Kabisch et  al. 2017). 2. Biodiversity in the form of floodplain or mangrove ecosystems  can help to pro- tect human populations from the impact of severe floods partly caused by climate change (Temmerman et  al. 2013). 3. Different species or varieties of plants and animals can help to adapt agricultural systems to climate change, so that they can provide sufficient nutrients and healthy diets (Lin 2011). The emphasis of policy linkages was first on wetlands (see below) and nature- based solutions in urban areas (Kabisch et  al. 2016, 2017; WHO Regional Office for Europe 2016), while the biodiversity-climate-health nexus has also been considered in much broader applications (see also Romanelli et  al. 2015). In the following sec- 1 For an overview of policy measures see http://www.who.int/globalchange/health_policy/en/ (accessed 8 August 2018). 14 Global Developments: Policy Support for  Linking Biodiversity, Health and  Climate…