Save species too: UN

NEW YORK: To save the planet, the world needs to tackle the crises of climate change and species loss together, taking measures that fix both and not just one, United Nations scientists say.

A joint report yesterday by separate UN scientific bodies that look at climate change and biodiversity loss found there are ways to simultaneously attack the two global problems, but some fixes to warming could accelerate extinctions of plants and animals.

For example, measures such as expansion of bioenergy crops like corn, or efforts to pull carbon dioxide from the air and bury it, could use so much land — twice the size of India — that the impact would be ‘‘fairly catastrophic on biodiversity,’’ said coauthor and biologist Almut Arneth at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

Policy responses to climate change and biodiversity loss had long been siloed, with different government agencies responsible for each, said coauthor Pamela McElwee, a human ecologist at Rutgers University. The problems worsened each other, were intertwined and in the end hurt people, scientists said.

‘‘Climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening human wellbeing as well as society,’’ said report cochair HansOtto Portner, a German biologist who helps oversee the impacts group of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

‘‘It’s high time to fix what we got wrong,’’ he said.

‘‘The climate system is offtrack and the biodiversity is suffering.’’

There were many measures that could address both problems at once, the report said.

‘‘Protecting and restoring highcarbon ecosystems,’’ such as tropical forests and peatlands, should be high priority, said coauthor Pete Smith, a plant and soil scientist at the University of Aberdeen.

While some climate solutions could increase species loss, scientists said efforts to curb extinctions did not really harm the climate.