The land and sea routes to 2030: a call for greater attention on all small islands in global environmental policy

Abstract

Islands have unique vulnerabilities to biodiversity loss and climate change. Current Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement are insufficient to avoid the irreversible loss of critical island ecosystems. Existing research, policies, and finance also do not sufficiently address small islands' social-environmental challenges. For instance, the new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) mentions islands in the invasive species management target. This focus is important, as islands are at high risk to biological invasions; however, this is the only GBF target that mentions islands. There are threats of equal or greater urgency to small islands, including coastal hazards and overexploitation. Ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves are crucial for biodiversity, coastal protection, and human livelihoods, yet are unaddressed in the GBF. While research and global policy, including targeted financial flows, have a strong focus on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), the situation of other small islands has been largely overlooked. Here, through a review of policy developments and examples from islands in the Philippines and Chile, we urge that conservation and climate change policies place greater emphasis on acknowledging the diversity of small islands and their unique governance challenges, extending the focus beyond SIDS. Moving forward, global policy and research should include the recognition of small islands as metacommunities linked by interacting species and social-ecological systems to emphasize their connectivity rather than their isolation. Coalition-building and knowledge-sharing, particularly with local, Indigenous and traditional knowledge-holders from small islands, is needed to meet global goals on biodiversity and sustainable development by 2030.

Fig. 1. The nexus of interactions in small island systems.

Anthropogenic activities (orange arrows) such as land use change contribute to climate change, which itself exacerbates these impacts (red arrows). Climate change, invasive species (magenta arrows) and extreme events such as tropical cyclones (blue arrows) also have significant impacts on biodiversity. Feedbacks between these factors will affect the provision of ecosystem services toward human communities (green arrows), as well as threaten unique island species and ecosystems (brown arrows). There are many other important factors in this nexus, such as population growth, affluence, and policy agreements, which all have impacts on biodiversity in an intricate and dynamic system, reflecting the complexity of island development and conservation. Here, we focus on a simplified representation of this complex system to illustrate the connectedness within island social-ecological systems. Background image was obtained from Pixabay on a CC0 license.

Fig. 2. Chile’s island territories.

Chile counts several islands and archipelagos as part of its national territory. Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the islands of the Juan Fernández Archipelago (the islands of a Robinson Crusoe, b Alejandro Selkirk and c Santa Clara) are threatened by invasive species and overexploitation, which can decimate endemic biodiversity as is the case of Rapa Nui. Robinson Crusoe Island (c) is globally the fourth most invaded surface by woody plants. Vegetation cover varies throughout the islands, but little forest cover remains in Rapa Nui. Scale bar shows 1 km.

Fig. 3. Double-barrier reef Danajon Bank, Philippines.

Danajon Bank is spread across several island municipalities in central Philippines. Inset photo from Google Earth.