New York City Climate Week is held annually in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly. Climate change is already reshaping our world. Nature can serve as an essential part of the solution. These are the key messages WCS is sharing this week.

Climate Change is Changing Everything

• The world has underestimated the extent to which climate change is already reshaping our world.
• The latest models also show the future impacts of climate change hitting far harder, far sooner than we had previously thought likely.
• Undervaluing the variety of roles that nature plays in both limiting, mitigating and buffering against climate change has been a major cause of this miscalculation
• The interlinked crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and novel zoonotic diseases are accelerating. Addressing these crises demands individual responses to each but also actions which reflect their mutually reinforcing relationship with nature at their heart.
• The impact will be most severe in areas where the relationship between people and nature are most tightly linked. Conversely, investing in nature at these places will have greatest positive impacts on people and the planet.

Nature is Key to the Climate Crisis Solution

• Nature is an essential solution to the climate crisis. Healthy ecosystems act as carbon sinks, buffer against extreme weather events, and protect human health. Yet, we are losing nature at the very moment we need it most.
• We continue to value parts of nature (e.g. carbon, water etc) thereby undervaluing the whole.
• We must recognize the true value of nature, not just for climate but for economies, for cultures and its own intrinsic value.

Building Resilience is Our Priority

• As climate change amplifies systemic pressures, retaining and building the resilience of natural systems becomes the primary focus of global conservation efforts. Ecological integrity—the health of whole ecosystems—is central to this resilience.
• Protecting lands and seas with high ecological integrity, restoring those under threat, and safeguarding the rights of those who can deliver this, such as Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs & LCs) will be essential to nature's survival and “our common future”.

Ecological Integrity: The Foundation for Nature's Recovery

• Ecological integrity is not just about conserving parts of nature but about recognizing the value of the whole. It is also the measure of ecosystem resilience in the face of current and impending pressures such as forest fires, ocean warming and desertification.
• By focusing on an ecosystem’s ecological integrity we not only capture the range of its values but make it more likely that it will be resilient in the face of pressures and continue to provide the range of climate, environmental, social, cultural and economic benefits.
• Many IPs & LCs have long maintained this view of valuing the whole, not just some parts of nature, which makes a rights-based approach that affirms the rights of IPs & LCs not just an ethical imperative but an effective pathway to tackling the three crises.
• By prioritizing ecological integrity, WCS ensures that our interventions are the most effective, efficient and equitable for addressing the interlinked crises of our time. Our ultimate objective is to put the health of nature at the heart of the global response to the climate, biodiversity and health crises.

Financing Nature for a Resilient Future

• Although nature accounts for 30% of the climate solution, it receives just a fraction of the climate-related investments. This disparity must change.
• We need to mobilize new and existing forms of financing to support nature-based solutions. 

Unifying Climate, Nature, and Health Responses

• Ecological integrity is the unifying concept for biodiversity, climate, and health outcomes. We cannot truly solve these crises without nature being the resilient heart of the response.
• Our goal is to secure the most important places for climate, biodiversity and health, on a scale with partners to respond to the challenges we face, while also creating the policies and programs that will transform global action and investment commensurate with the true role that nature plays in supporting us and our planet.

By adopting a unified, resilient, and ecologically[1] - driven approach, we are ensuring that nature remains at the center of the global fight against climate change, benefiting both people and the planet.