The diversity of life on Earth—which provides vital services to humanity (1)—stems from the difference between rates of evolutionary diversification and extinction. Human activities have shifted the balance (2): Species extinction rates are an estimated 1000 times the “background” rate (3) and could increase to 10,000 times the background rate should species threatened with extinction succumb to pressures they face (4). Reversing these trends is a focus of the Convention on Biological Diversitys 2020 Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and its 20 Aichi Targets and is explicitly incorporated into the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We identify major gaps in data available for assessing global biodiversity threats and suggest mechanisms for closing them

Aim  Coastal biodiversity hotspots are globally threatened by sea‐level rise. As such it is important to understand how ecosystems resist, respond and adapt to sea‐level rise. Using pollen, geochemistry, charcoal and diatom records in conjunction with previously published palaeoclimatic records, we investigated the mechanism, interactions and ecosystem response and resilience of Madagascar's littoral forest to late Holocene sea‐level rise. Location  Sediment sequences were collected along the south‐east coast of Madagascar in two adjacent habitats in Mandena; the highly diverse littoral forest fragment and species‐poor Erica‐matrix. Methods  We used a multi‐proxy approach to investigate the relative influence of environmental changes on the littoral ecosystem. We reconstructed past vegetation and fire dynamics over the past 6500 years at two sites in the littoral forest using fossil pollen and macrofossil charcoal contained in sedimentary sequences. Alongside these records we reconstructed past marine transgressions from the same sedimentary sequences using geochemical analyses, and a salinity and drought index through the analysis of fossil diatoms. Results  Our findings indicated that it was the synergistic effect of sea‐level rise coupled with rainfall deficits that triggered a threshold event with a switch from two types of littoral forest (an open Uapaca forest and a closed littoral forest fragment) to an Erica–Myrica heath/grassland occurring in approximately less than 100 years. Resilience to sea‐level rise differed in the two adjacent habitats, suggesting that the littoral forest fragment was more resilient to the impacts of sea‐level change and aridity than the open Uapaca woodland. Conclusions  We demonstrated that the littoral ecosystem was influenced by late Holocene sea‐level rise and climatic desiccation. While climate change‐integrated conservation strategies address the effects of climate change on species distribution and dispersal, our work suggests that more attention should be paid to the impacts of interactive climatic variables that affect ecosystem thresholds.

Consumption of globally traded agricultural commodities like soy and palm oil is one of the primary causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss in some of the world’s most species-rich ecosystems. However, the complexity of global supply chains has confounded efforts to reduce impacts. Companies and governments with sustainability commitments struggle to understand their own sourcing patterns, while the activities of more unscrupulous actors are conveniently masked by the opacity of global trade. We combine state-of-the-art material flow, economic trade, and biodiversity impact models to produce an innovative approach for understanding the impacts of trade on biodiversity loss and the roles of remote markets and actors. We do this for the production of soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, home to more than 5% of the world´s species. Distinct sourcing patterns of consumer countries and trading companies result in substantially different impacts on endemic species. Connections between individual buyers and specific hot spots explain the disproportionate impacts of some actors on endemic species and individual threatened species, such as the particular impact of European Union consumers on the recent habitat losses for the iconic giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla). In making these linkages explicit, our approach enables commodity buyers and investors to target their efforts much more closely to improve the sustainability of their supply chains in their sourcing regions while also transforming our ability to monitor the impact of such commitments over time.

Aim There remains some uncertainty concerning the causes of extinctions of Madagascar's megafauna. One hypothesis is that they were caused by overhunting by humans. A second hypothesis is that their extinction was caused by both environmental change and hunting. This paper systematically addresses the second hypothesis through examination of two new pollen records from southeastern Madagascar alongside other published records across the island.Location South-eastern Madagascar.Methods We reconstructed past vegetation and fire dynamics over the past 6000 years at two sites in south-eastern Madagascar (Ste-Luce) using fossil pollen and charcoal contained in sedimentary sequences. We investigated drivers of vegetation changes and how these, in turn, influenced faunal species in the southeast, using published climatic, archaeological and faunal records. Further, we also used published records to provide a synthesis of environmental changes on the whole island.

The estimated period in which human colonization of Madagascar began has expanded recently to 5000–1000 y B.P., six times its range in 1990, prompting revised thinking about early migration sources, routes, maritime capability and environmental changes. Cited evidence of colonization age includes anthropogenic palaeoecological data 2500–2000 y B.P., megafaunal butchery marks 4200–1900 y B.P. and OSL dating to 4400 y B.P. of the Lakaton’i Anja occupation site. Using large samples of newly-excavated bone from sites in which megafaunal butchery was earlier dated >2000 y B.P. we find no butchery marks until ~1200 y B.P., with associated sedimentary and palynological data of initial human impact about the same time. Close analysis of the Lakaton’i Anja chronology suggests the site dates <1500 y B.P. Diverse evidence from bone damage, palaeoecology, genomic and linguistic history, archaeology, introduced biota and seafaring capability indicate initial human colonization of Madagascar 1350–1100 y B.P.