Supporting the Global Biodiversity Framework monitoring with LUI, the Land Use Intensity indicator

Abstract

Biodiversity loss has been identified as one of the environmental impacts where humankind has been tres-passing planetary boundaries most significantly. Going beyond the pressures causing damages (calling them ‘direct drivers’) and analysing their underlying driving forces, IPBES, the Intergovernmental Sci-ence-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, also identified a series of indirect drivers. The Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework GBF including its suggested monitoring approach is intended to and claims to be a policy response to such analyses.
 However, to assess the human impact on ecosystems as a basis for planning conservation and restoration, as foreseen in the GBF, monitoring ecosystem typologies (in the GBF with reference to the UN statistical standard SEEA ES, which in turn refers to the IUCN ecosystem classification) is not enough. It needs to be complemented with data on the severity of human impacts, and on the history of places, i.e. how and when the current ecosystem status was brought about.
 In this conceptual paper we suggest LUI, a deliberately simple ordinal scale index for land use intensity changes, to address these two gaps. It is based on the hemeroby concept, measuring the human impact as deviation from naturalness. This makes it an information collection and presentation tool for those working in landscape planning and management. LUI’s simple and intuitively understandable structure makes it suitable for citizens’ science applications, and thus for participative monitoring when extensive statistical data gathering is not feasible, and past data are not available. Of course is can also be used as a simple too for communicating when detailed statistical data series are available.
 While the aggregate index is expected to communicate well, its components are more relevant to motivate and help policy makers to prioritise their decisions according to the severity of recent anthropogenic ecosystem disturabances.