The Ecological "Clock" Is Stopping: New Challenges for Global Biodiversity Governance in the Context of Accelerating Climate Change

矛盾的现象：气候在加速，生态在减速

When global average temperatures keep breaking records, people naturally expect the response of the natural world to accelerate in tandem: species migration speeding up, ecosystems reshuffling, new combinations forming in a hotter world. However, a large-scale international study covering terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems has revealed the opposite reality—species turnover rates have not risen but fallen over the past half century, declining by about one-third on average.

The study, led by scholars at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and published in *Nature Communications*, is based on a global biodiversity survey database spanning nearly a century. The researchers compared the rapid warming period after the 1970s with the period before it, finding that short-term (1–5 year) species turnover rates slowed across the board, from land birds to deep-sea benthic organisms. One of the study's authors, theoretical ecologist Axel Rossberg, said: "We were surprised by how strong the effect was—turnover rates typically fell by a third."

This paradox breaks the linear expectation that "climate change necessarily drives ecological turnover." Since the Industrial Revolution, habitat fragmentation, pollution, and overexploitation caused by human activity have been eroding the ecosystem's "self-repair engine" in more insidious ways.

内部动力学：生态系统的"多吸引子"与自我更新

For a long time, the mainstream narrative in ecology attributed changes in species composition to external climate pressure. But this study proposes an alternative explanatory framework: ecosystems themselves possess an internally driven, continuous turnover dynamic—the "multi-attractor phase" predicted by physicist Guy Bunin in 2017. In this phase, species engage in rock-paper-scissors-like interactions with one another, and species combinations keep changing even when the climate is stable.

This intrinsic mechanism enables ecosystems to keep experimenting through trial and error amid disturbances, maintaining resilience and adaptive potential. However, when human activity shrinks the regional species pool, the number of "candidates" available for migration and evolution drops sharply, and the turnover engine gradually fails for lack of fuel. The study's first author, Emmanuel Nwankwo, put it this way: "Nature is like a self-repairing engine that constantly replaces old parts with new ones, but what we found is that this engine is shutting down."

表面稳定是错觉：自然减速的隐藏代价

The most cautionary implication of this finding is that seemingly stable ecosystems may not be healthy. In traditional assessments, an unchanged species composition is often regarded as an important marker of ecological health. But the study shows that this "stability" may in fact be the result of large-scale biodiversity depletion—not because the change has been completed, but because there is nowhere left for change to go.For billions of rural and coastal residents across the Global South who depend on ecosystem services, what does this invisible decline mean? Wetlands continue to absorb floods, but a stalled turnover in benthic communities may weaken their purification capacity; forests appear lush, but the homogenization of pollinator communities will sooner or later affect food security; coral reefs keep bleaching amid marine heatwaves, while the larval supply needed for recovery becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. Ecosystem services are not infinitely supplied—when internal dynamics are "locked in," both resistance and resilience are lost simultaneously.

Global Governance: From Species Counts to Process Resilience

The "Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework," adopted by the international community in 2022, set the target of protecting 30% of land and ocean by 2030. This study reminds us that the "area indicator" of protected areas cannot automatically cover the "process health" of ecosystems. If internal species turnover mechanisms fail, the long-term evolutionary capacity of ecosystems will decline even within protected areas.

Therefore, global biodiversity strategies need to shift from measuring species inventories to monitoring ecological processes. Target 15.5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasizes halting the decline of biodiversity, but there is an urgent need to supplement indicator systems focused on turnover rates, connectivity, and functional redundancy. Similarly, climate mitigation and adaptation policies should not only focus on total carbon sinks, but should more carefully assess the ability of natural ecosystems to maintain their own dynamics.

ESG and Natural Capital: A "Deceleration Signal" the Investment Community Cannot Ignore

This study has direct implications for ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing. In recent years, natural capital risk has become a focus of mainstream asset managers, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has issued a framework requiring companies to assess and disclose their dependencies and impacts on nature. However, existing disclosures often emphasize static species or habitat indicators and rarely measure "dynamic processes."

When an ecosystem's turnover rate drops by one-third, its capacity to provide services over the long term is weakened. Industries that rely on timber, fisheries, agriculture, and recreational tourism are in fact bearing the accumulated depreciation of natural capital. ESG rating agencies and portfolio managers should heed the deeper risks revealed by this report: while climate news dominates the headlines, the "internal gears" of ecosystems may sound the alarm earlier than temperature records.

Intergenerational Responsibility Between Developed and Developing Countries

It is worth noting that the slowdown in species turnover is not evenly distributed across the globe. Areas with high anthropogenic disturbance intensity are often precisely where ecosystem turnover rates have declined most sharply. These areas are mainly in developing countries in the tropics and subtropics, which are simultaneously caught between the twin pressures of climate impacts and biodiversity loss. International climate finance remains highly concentrated on mitigation, while adaptation finance that supports ecosystem resilience is clearly insufficient.Promoting global development financing reform and making biodiversity a precondition for infrastructure investment assessment is no longer optional. The coupling between climate, biodiversity, and human development is closer than any single agreement. Funds should flow to projects that enhance the resilience of ecological processes: restoring wetland connectivity, establishing ecological corridors, and investing in community-led woodland management to maintain the "species pool" needed for succession.

Conclusion: Recalibrating the Long-term Clock of Development and Nature

This research is a scientific wake-up call and also a turning point for development. While human forces accelerate climate change, the natural world is applying its own unique internal brakes in silence. When designing economies, humanity often uses GDP as its clock, while nature operates in another time zone made up of species succession, energy flows, and biological interactions.

Truly long-term sustainable development must calibrate both sets of clocks simultaneously. Global governance needs to shift from a "climate-first" approach to "integrated socio-ecological resilience"; ESG needs to incorporate natural processes into core financial analysis; and every country that depends on natural resources should re-examine whether its development path is inadvertently turning off the ecosystem's self-repair switch.

The alarm of nature's deceleration has sounded—there is still time, but time is likewise running out.