Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy

Abstract

Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy Summary paragraph Increased efforts are required to prevent further losses of terrestrial biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides 1,2. Ambitious targets have been proposed, such as reversing the declining trends in biodiversity 3-yet, just feeding the growing human population will make this a challenge 4. We use an ensemble of land-use and biodiversity models to assess whether (and if so, how) humanity can reverse terrestrial biodiversity declines due to habitat conversion, a major threat to biodiversity 5. We show that immediate efforts, consistent with the broader sustainability agenda but of unprecedented ambition and coordination, may allow to feed the growing human population while reversing global terrestrial biodiversity trends from habitat conversion. If we decide to increase the extent of land under conservation management, restore degraded land, and generalize landscapelevel conservation planning, biodiversity trends from habitat conversion could become positive by mid-century on average across models (confidence interval: 2042-2061), but not for all models. Food prices could increase and, on average across models, almost half (confidence interval: 34-50%) of future biodiversity losses could not be avoided. However, additionally tackling the drivers of landuse change may avoid conflict with affordable food provision and reduces the food system's environmental impacts. Through further sustainable intensification and trade, reduced food waste, and healthier human diets, more than two thirds of future biodiversity losses are avoided and the biodiversity trends from habitat conversion are reversed by 2050 for almost all models. Although limiting further loss will remain challenging in several biodiversity-rich regions, and other threats, such as climate change, must be addressed to truly reverse biodiversity declines, our results show that bold conservation efforts and food system transformation are central to an effective post-2020 biodiversity strategy. Reversing biodiversity trends by 2050 Without further efforts to counteract habitat loss and degradation, we projected that global biodiversity will continue to decline (BASE scenario; Fig. 1). Rates of loss over time for all nine BDIs in 2010-2050 were close to or greater than those estimated for 1970-2010 (Extended data Extended Data Table 1). For various biodiversity aspects, on average across IAM and BDI combinations, peak losses over the 2010-2100 period were: 13% (range: 1-26%) for the extent of suitable habitat, 54% (range: 45-63%) for wildlife population density, 5% (range: 2-9%) for local compositional intactness , 4% (range: 1-12%) for global extinctions, and 4% (range: 2-8%) for regional extinctions (Extended Data Table 1). Percentage losses were greatest in biodiversity-rich regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America; Extended Data Fig. 2). The projected future trends for habitat loss and degradation and its driv...

A research perspective towards a more complete biodiversity footprint: a report from the World Biodiversity Forum

“…Increasing synergies between the LCA and the biodiversity conservation communities is essential to best inform the post 2020 biodiversity targets and policies, which also mention the mainstreaming of biodiversity impacts into production processes (CBD 2020; EC 2020a). The IPBES Global Assessment has clearly indicated that societies need transformative change to address biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation (IPBES 2019), including the way we produce and consume, if we aim to bend the curve of biodiversity loss (Marques et al 2019;Leclère et al 2020). In fact, the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 (European Commission 2020) states that "biodiversity considerations need to be better integrated into public and business decision making at all levels".…”

“…The mean species abundance (MSA) is a metric conceptually similar to the LBII, reporting the abundance of species found in relation to a given pressure relative to its abundance found in an undisturbed situation (Schipper et al 2020). Both LBII and MSA have already been used in modeling frameworks to investigate global integrated scenarios of biodiversity change in response to different environmental pressures (Newbold et al 2016;Schipper et al 2020;Leclère et al 2020), and MSA has been coupled to LCA to measure business impacts on biodiversity (Lammerant 2018; Crenna et al 2020). Because they are based on species abundances, LBII and MSA are good candidates to account for biodiversity impacts regarding ecosystem multifunctionality.…”

“…Therefore, LCA might need to be complemented with biodiversity indicators able to preserve species identity (and extinction risk) or to species potentially affected. Ideally, and as has recently been demonstrated in a global scenario-based modeling effort, several complementary indicators are considered using an ensemble of biodiversity models (Leclère et al 2020). Second, the selected indicators do not capture how environmental impacts affect species' physiology, dispersal, or their interactions with other organisms.…”

How can social–ecological system models simulate the emergence of social–ecological crises?

“…Ecological: Mechanistic modelling of honeybee populations based on individual-, colony-and population-level processes (Becher et al, 2018) Ecological: Databases of species traits such as the 'TRY' Plant Trait Database including dispersal traits (Kattge et al, 2011) Social-ecological: Agent-based modelling of huntergatherer strategies and environmental resources/ prey species in spatially explicit environment (Janssen & Hill, 2014 Social-ecological: Use of invasive species monitoring data to disentangle human-mediated and natural dispersal processes (Horvitz et al, 2017) Demographic change Social: Parallelised agent-based modelling of human population dynamics based on key processes (Montañola-Sales et al, 2016) Social: Global demographic databases (United Nations Statistics Division, 2019) Ecological: Stochastic population modelling of emperor penguin responses to climate change (Jenouvrier et al, 2009) Ecological: Bayesian modelling to extend species demography data coverage to under-studied species (Kindsvater et al, 2018) Social-ecological: Agent-based modelling of demographic change in indigenous hunting communities and their prey species (Iwamura et al, 2014) Social-ecological: Long-term data records covering changes in social and ecological communities as, e.g., road network develops in Amazon (Klarenberg et al, 2019) Institutional & governance interventions Social: Agent-based modelling of individual and institutional activities in land system (Holzhauer et al, 2019) Global/regional databases of policies and impacts relating to, for example, environment or climate (New Climate Institute, 2019;OECD, 2019) Ecological: Multi-model framework to identify pathways and policies to reverse biodiversity loss trends (Leclère et al, 2020) Social-ecological: Economic-environmental modelling to explore effects of different policies on land use and biodiversity (Bryan et al, 2016), and network modelling of the effects of social institutions on ecological conditions, for example, of coral reefs (Barnes et al, 2019) social-ecological models and datasets suggest that they are feasible (Table 2). If this approach is successfully developed and applied, it could have a number of other benefits.…”

A burning question: Can savannah fire management generate enough carbon revenue to help save the lion from extinction?

“…Although ecological restoration can be prohibitively expensive, careful design can triple conservation benefits while halving the costs 8,9 . These cost-benefit improvements will be necessary for meeting global conservation targets to reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss 10 .…”