Is biodiversity loss as urgent a crisis as climate change?

Which is the bigger threat to species right now?

If you look at what is actually driving species to extinction today, habitat loss and overexploitation are far more damaging than climate change. A major 2022 analysis of empirical studies found that land and sea use change has been the dominant direct driver of recent biodiversity loss worldwide, with direct exploitation of natural resources ranking second and pollution third. Climate change and invasive alien species were significantly less important than the top two drivers [5]. In other words, bulldozing a forest or overfishing a reef is currently killing more species than rising temperatures are.

This pattern is stark when you look at recent extinctions. An analysis of vertebrate extinctions since 1900 found that none of the arguments founded on climate change's wide-ranging effects are as urgent for biodiversity as those for habitat loss and overexploitation [4]. The authors argue that the current perception that climate change is the principal threat to biodiversity is at best premature and detracts focus from the primary threats [4].

How do climate change and biodiversity loss feed each other?

Even though climate change is not the top driver of extinctions right now, it is a rapidly growing threat that makes everything worse. A 2024 review in The Lancet Planetary Health warns that the concurrent pressures of rising global temperatures, species decline, and infectious diseases represent an unprecedented planetary crisis, and that non-linear interactions among these pressures make considering interconnections essential [1]. For example, climate change alters the distribution of ecosystems and species, and in Mexico, regional models project temperature increases of 0.5 to 5°C by the end of the century, which could raise extinction risk from 3% to 48% in terrestrial ecosystems [2].

The relationship goes both ways: biodiversity loss also worsens climate change. Degraded ecosystems—like cleared forests or drained peatlands—lose their ability to absorb and store carbon. A 2023 study found that restoring grasslands, which are often neglected in favor of forest planting, could reduce plant extinction risk by up to 82% in Germany while also contributing to climate resilience [3]. Conversely, some well-intentioned climate policies, such as large-scale tree planting in places that were never forested, can harm biodiversity [8]. This means you cannot solve one crisis without considering the other.

So what should we prioritize?

The evidence points to a clear strategy: stop destroying habitats and overexploiting species first, while simultaneously cutting emissions. A 2022 study concluded that stopping global biodiversity loss requires policies and actions to tackle all the major drivers and their interactions, not some of them in isolation [5]. The authors of the extinction analysis put it bluntly: conserving ecosystems by focusing on habitat loss and overexploitation is not only the best way to protect biodiversity, but it is also the only available, economically viable, global strategy to reverse climate change [4].

This is not an either/or choice. Protecting and restoring natural habitats—whether forests, grasslands, or oceans—serves a dual purpose: it safeguards species and stores carbon. For example, forests act as vital carbon sinks, absorbing and storing atmospheric carbon as biomass, while also preserving species diversity [7]. The key is to avoid siloed approaches that focus on climate or biodiversity alone, and instead pursue integrated, ecosystem-based strategies [6][8].

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