Multiple factors are affecting most of the species on Earth

Essay by Thomas E. Lovejoy, Science Advances, May 10, 2019

Thomas Lovejoy, Univ. Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030

REFERENCE: Science Advances, 06 May 2019: Vol. 5, no. 5, eaax7492; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax7492

The first official report of the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), released on May 6th in Paris, provides the first modern authoritative assessment of planetary biodiversity and related contributions of nature to people (CNP)–dubbed ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are those charities of nature, both nebulous and tangible, that serve as the backbone of human well-being: food, fresh water, clean air, wood, fiber, genetic resources, and medicine.

The IPBES is being called the IPCC of Biodiversity, with the IPCC referring to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the recognized assembly of the United Nations created in 1988 to provide global leaders with regular scientific assessment of the implications and risks of climate change. The IPBES, founded in 2012, came slow on the heels of the IPCC for a variety of reasons but in large part because grappling with, gathering data for, and analyzing the myriad features of global biodiversity and ecosystem services are astoundingly complex endeavors.

A scientific assessment of the state of biodiversity and ecosystems services in the context of climate reveals that all are inextricably intertwined, united yet dispersed, invaluable yet monetizable, reflecting nature in its holistic role as the bedrock of human civilization. The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment served as an early appraisal of the state of life on Earth. The IPBES synthesis is today’s report card, and it tells a short story: Eden is gone. While the planetary garden still exists, it is in deep disrepair, frayed and fragmented almost beyond recognition.

Not unexpectedly, the specific findings are depressing. More species are threatened with extinction than any time in human history. Ever growing human populations and their activities have severely altered 75% of the terrestrial environment, 40% of the marine environment, and 50% of streams and rivers. The health of freshwater biodiversity has been particularly neglected because freshwater is widely understood and managed more as a physical resource vital to survival rather than as the special and delicate habitat that it provides for an extraordinary array of organisms.

The primary drivers of negative trends are also no surprise: In descending order, these adverse impacts include rapid changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of natural resources, climate change, pollution, and invasive species. Of monumental note is that, collectively, significant destructive forces arise from the actions of impoverished peoples living at the edges of society, working to eke out an existence often with little choice but to have minimal concern for environmental impact.

The role of climate change in biodiversity loss is also severely underestimated because of the lag between rising levels of CO2 concentration and the equivalent accumulation of the radiant heat that leads to warming and biological impact. Ironically, climate change is also, in part, the consequence of biodiversity destruction: The amount of carbon in the atmosphere from degraded and destroyed ecosystems is now equal to what remains in extant ecosystems. The additional CO2 emanating from the combustion of fossil fuels is in fact ancient solar energy that was trapped and converted by ancient ecosystems and is now being released in a geological instant.

While the IPCC reports have documented climate change and sounded warnings, the IPBES report highlights aspects of the degradation of planetary natural systems that equally warrant immediate attention and action. As dire as the findings in the assessment may be, they likely also hold the ingredients of solutions. For example, economists and decision makers are largely unaware of (or chose to ignore) the contributions of natural resources to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of indigenous peoples or the poor; at the same time, many of those people are often equally reluctant to embrace the monetary value of local ecosystem services.

CNP and ecosystem services are essentially two congruent valuation systems, and both are recognized by the IPBES assessment. The danger is that decision makers are often distant from the actual sites of valued biodiversity and ecosystems; as a result, they do not see actual monetized benefits from the sustainable use of natural resources and so peg the value of these resources at, or near, zero.

Adding to the flaws in the calculus of conservation and sustainability is the surprising inattention to the value of new discoveries from biodiversity and ecosystems to life sciences research. For example, researchers recently discovered that a soil fungus in Nova Scotia can functionally disarm antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a discovery that could transform practices in medicine, agriculture, and beyond. About 70% of drugs used for cancer are natural or bioinspired products.

The polymerase chain reaction aided by an enzyme from a Yellowstone hot spring bacterium may have generated close to a trillion dollars of benefit through rapid multiplication of genetic material. The list of treasures uncovered in the elements and processes of the natural world grows daily; at present, however, these kinds of contributions from natural resources to human health and life sciences are neither recognized nor accounted for and so are treated as free and without value.

The IPBES report findings are more than sobering: 35 of 44 assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals depend on authentic transformational change to reverse trends of degradation. The assessment concludes that the current course of planetary degradation can be altered only with preemptive and precautionary actions, strengthened laws and related enforcement, dramatic changes in economic and social incentives, increased monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystems, and integrated decision-making across sectors and jurisdictions.

These dramatic changes will need to be supported by leaders, who themselves must promote new ways of understanding the meaning of “quality of life,” ones that value consuming less, wasting less, conserving more, and engaging truly novel approaches to global resource conservation and management. New tools will need to include technologies, creative economic models, and future-facing patterns of social behavior that are respectful of the diversity of needs, cultures, and local resources across the planet. These tools will need to be designed and applied to manage land use, agricultural development, and resource distribution in ways that will feed everyone adequately without further destroying nature.

Happily, the publication of the IPBES assessment coincides with new and hopeful visions emerging from the conservation community that adjust the scale and impact of collective efforts upward dramatically. The Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s goal of Half-Earth was one of the first, with the aim of conserving half of the planet’s lands and seas to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including humans. The National Geographic Society has a goal to place 30% of the planet in protected areas by 2030. The Global Deal for Nature, recently published in Science Advances (eaaw2869, March 19/19 issue) is essentially coincident with the One Earth vision from the Leonardo DeCaprio Foundation.

The story of the unraveling of the planetary web of life has been told for decades, well before Rachel Carson’s prediction of silent springs. With its publication, the IPBES assessment, however imperfect, is now the most complete and comprehensive synthesis to date on the state of the health of the planet with all its natural resources and potential for contributing to human well-being.

Readers at all levels of government, in the for-profit sector, and in civil society should heed its warnings and act on its vision and recommendations in haste. Together, we now sit at the fail-safe point and must decide what to do; collectively, all sectors must embrace the challenges raised by the assessment, rise to action, and do what we must do to ensure a viable future for our living planet and for humans and the extraordinary variety of life with which it and we are blessed.

>>> This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.

A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets

Authors are E. Dinerstein1,*, C. Vynne1, E. Sala2, A. R. Joshi3, S. Fernando1, T. E. Lovejoy4, J. Mayorga2,5, D. Olson6, G. P. Asner7, J. E. M. Baillie2, N. D. Burgess8, K. Burkart9, R. F. Noss10, Y. P. Zhang11, A. Baccini12, T. Birch13, N. Hahn1,14, L. N. Joppa15 and E. Wikramanayake16

* – 1RESOLVE, Washington, DC, USA, 2National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, USA, 3University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 4George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, 5University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 6Zoological Society of London, London, UK, 7Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA, 8UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, UK, 9Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 10Florida Institute for Conservation Science, Chuluota, FL, USA, 11State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650223, China, 12Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA, 13Google, Mountain View, CA, USA, 14Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA, 15Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA, 16Environmental Foundation Ltd., Colombo, Sri Lanka

SOURCE: Science Advances, April 19, 2019: Vol. 5, no. 4, eaaw2869, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2869

ABSTRACT for The Global Deal for Nature

The Global Deal for Nature (GDN) is a time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. Pairing the GDN and the Paris Climate Agreement would avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services. New findings give urgency to this union: Less than half of the terrestrial realm is intact, yet conserving all native ecosystems—coupled with energy transition measures—will be required to remain below a 1.5°C rise in average global temperature.

The GDN targets 30% of Earth to be formally protected and an additional 20% designated as climate stabilization areas, by 2030, to stay below 1.5°C. We highlight the 67% of terrestrial ecoregions that can meet 30% protection, thereby reducing extinction threats and carbon emissions from natural reservoirs. Freshwater and marine targets included here extend the GDN to all realms and provide a pathway to ensuring a more livable biosphere.

INTRODUCTION to The Global Deal for Nature

Nature conservation efforts, like climate change policies, are being reassessed in the midst of a planetary emergency. Climate concerns rightly prompted the 2015 Paris Agreement, which has facilitated coordinated global action not only among governments but also among companies, cities, and citizens. Research since then suggests that efforts to stabilize the climate and avoid the undesirable outcomes of >1.5°C warming will require a rapid reduction in land conversion and a moratorium by about 2035.

The most logical path to avoid the approaching crisis is maintaining and restoring at least 50% of the Earth’s land area as intact natural ecosystems, in combination with energy transition measures. Those measures by themselves will likely be insufficient and must be augmented by restoration to create negative emissions to offset the likely clearing and release of greenhouse gases that will occur until a 2035 moratorium can be reached.

Natural ecosystems are key to maintaining human prosperity in a warming world and 65% of Paris Agreement signatories have committed to restoring or conserving ecosystems. Intact forests, and especially tropical forests, sequester twice as much carbon as planted monocultures. These findings make forest conservation a critical approach to combat global warming. Because about two-thirds of all species on Earth are found in natural forests, maintaining intact forest is vital to prevent mass extinction.

However, carbon sequestration and storage extends far beyond rainforests: Peatlands, tundra, mangroves, and ancient grasslands are also important carbon storehouses and conserve distinct assemblages of plants and animals. Further, the importance of intact habitats extends to the freshwater and marine realms, with studies pointing to least disturbed wetlands and coastal habitats being superior in their ability to store carbon when compared with more disturbed sites.

Opportunities to address both climate change and the extinction crisis are time bound. Climate models show that we are approaching a tipping point: If current trends in habitat conversion and emissions do not peak by 2030, then it will become impossible to remain below 1.5°C. Similarly, if current land conversion rates, poaching of large animals, and other threats are not markedly slowed or halted in the next 10 years, “points of no return” will be reached for multiple ecosystems and species.

It has become clear that beyond 1.5°C, the biology of the planet becomes gravely threatened because ecosystems literally begin to unravel. Degradation of the natural environment also diminishes quality of life, threatens public health, and triggers human displacement because of lost access to clean drinking water, reduced irrigation of important subsistence crops, and exacerbation of climate-related storm and drought events. These occurrences will become increasingly worse without substantial action over the next few years. Additionally, human migrations, triggered by climate change–induced droughts and sea-level rise in combination with extreme weather events, could displace more than 100 million people by 2050, mostly in the southern hemisphere.

A companion pact to the Paris Agreement—a Global Deal for Nature (GDN)—could help ensure that climate targets are met while preventing species extinctions and the rapid erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms. The concept of a GDN as a policy mechanism emerged from an earlier study restricted to protecting biodiversity in the terrestrial realm. We expand that perspective to the freshwater and marine realms while simultaneously lending support to an alternative pathway to remaining below 1.5°C that relies heavily on aggressive conservation of remaining habitats.

This approach not only safeguards biodiversity but also is the cheapest and fastest alternative for addressing climate change and is not beholden to developing carbon removal technologies unlikely to be effective or to scale in the time-bound nature of the current twin crises. Here, we offer a policy framework based on scientific guidelines that could pair nature and climate deals, be mutually reinforcing, and recommend time-bound milestones and targets. We identify specific threats and drivers of biodiversity loss, and discuss costs of implementation of a GDN. Finally, we introduce breakthrough technologies for monitoring progress.

DISCUSSION of The Global Deal for Nature

The Paris Agreement offers a useful template for a GDN because it sets global targets, provides a model for financial support, and supports bottom-up efforts. All nations have signed on to this agreement. But the Paris Agreement is only a half-deal; it will not alone save the diversity of life on Earth or conserve ecosystem services upon which humanity depends. It is also reliant on natural climate solutions that require bolstering outside of the Paris Agreement to ensure that these natural approaches can contribute to its success. Yet, land-based sequestration efforts receive only about 2.5% of climate mitigation dollars.

At the same time that climate scientists were arriving at a single numerical target for maintaining Earth’s atmosphere at safe limits, biodiversity scientists identified multiple targets for the required habitats to conserve the rest of life on Earth. But to communicate effectively, as in the Paris Agreement, these many needs could be encompassed within a single target: protect at least half of Earth by 2050 and ensure that these areas are connected. The evidence arising since these calls were made clearly demonstrate that while we may be able to afford to wait to formally designate 50% protected in nature reserves, we need to fast-track the protection and restoration of all natural habitat by 2030.

A GDN that will ensure that we have at least 50% intact natural habitats by 2030 is the only path that will enable a climate-resilient future and is one that will offer a myriad of other benefits. Since the crucial role of intact, diverse systems has also been demonstrated to be essential for carbon storage the GDN will need to emphasize mechanisms for protecting intactness both inside and outside of protected areas (e.g. in CSAs/OECMs) well before 2050.

Tallis and colleagues demonstrated that with existing technologies and large-scale adoption of common conservation approaches (e.g., protected areas, renewable energy, sustainable fisheries management, and regenerative agriculture), it would be possible to advance a desired future of multiple economic and environmental objectives (including 50% of each biome intact, with the exception of temperate grasslands). This spatial coexistence is possible even with the prospects of feeding and supporting the material needs of a growing human population. The success of proposals to boost food production while protecting biodiversity will likely depend on our success in addressing human population growth, however, and our willingness to marshal financial resources accordingly.

Gross costs for nature conservation measures across half the Earth could be $100 billion per year, but the international community currently spends $4 billion to $10 billion per year on conservation. Extending the area-based targets in the post-2020 strategic plan for biodiversity to 30% by 2030 will likely require direct involvement of the private sector. In key sectors—fishing, forestry, agriculture, and insurance—corporations may be able to align their financial returns directly to reaching targets recommended by the GDN. However, the typical approach to conservation planning does not involve the real (net) costs because the direct benefits of conservation and the averted costs of inaction are not included in the calculations. Barbier and colleagues showed that potential direct benefits from biodiversity conservation for various sectors range from increasing annual profits by $53 billion in the seafood industry to $4300 billion in the insurance industry.

In addition, marine reserves can provide more economic benefits from tourism than fishing in many locations worldwide. Financial investments of even 10 to 20% of potential benefits from biodiversity conservation from three key industries could make up as much of one-third of the commitment needed to implement a GDN. A GDN may appeal to a broader set of nonstate actors, including corporations and local government entities. The solutions could be implemented in ways that have direct positive benefits to local or regional communities and especially indigenous peoples. Land-based jobs, food security, green space, access to wilderness, and ecosystem services are benefits that deliver advantages to rural and urban dwellers alike.

Complex life has existed on Earth for about 550 million years, and it is now threatened with the sixth mass extinction. If we fail to change course, it will take millions of years for Earth to recover an equivalent spectrum of biodiversity. Future generations of people will live in a biologically impoverished world. Adopting a GDN and the milestones and targets presented here would better allow humanity to develop a vibrant, low-impact economy and conserve intact ecosystems, all while leaving space for nature. Linking the GDN and the Paris Agreement could solve the two major challenges facing the biosphere and all the species within it and result in a return to safe operating space for humanity.