Towards a butterfly economy: A biodiversity doughnut of threats and values

The doughnut framework of social foundations and ecological ceilings has become a popular visual tool to assess progress towards sustainability and inform decision making.(1) While rich in indicators for human development, the framework is less detailed on planetary health. Biodiversity breakdown, one of nine planetary boundaries, ranks amongst the ecological ceilings with most relative overshoot. Given this overshoot and the strong dependence of human well-being on nature,(2) biodiversity conservation merits a complementary doughnut.

This paper proposes such a biodiversity doughnut with an outer ring that displays threats to biodiversity and an inner ring that tracks values derived from its conservation. The outer ring depicts global direct drivers of biodiversity loss as identified by IPBES (2019) or threat information from the IUCN Red List of endangered species.(3),(4) The inner ring draws from the Nature Futures and Nature’s Contributions to People frameworks and the ecosystem services literature.(2),(3),(5)

Visual prominence of threat categories in the outer ring can reflect relative importance (e.g., by using IUCN threat frequency as percentage of the doughnut radius). Threat mitigation scenarios can be displayed in the doughnut its margin, since the biodiversity doughnut has no overshoot equivalent. The biodiversity doughnut its inner ring seems less suitable for expressing relative importance of values, since some values will be impossible to translate in comparable terms.

The biodiversity doughnut offers ample opportunity for targeted downscaling, where downscaling to (bio-)region, industry, or firm supports nature-inclusive policymaking and business strategies.(6) Downscaled doughnuts to ecosystem or taxonomic levels present tools for environmental education and science communication. The paper illustrates downscaled doughnuts for Europe, Madagascar, mangroves, and butterflies, while being sensitive to knowledge gaps and uncertainty.

Through above methodological innovations, the biodiversity doughnut provides doughnut economics a second ‘wing’ in order to accelerate metamorphosis from the growth-based caterpillar economy to a just and sustainable butterfly economy.

References

(1) Fanning and Raworth, 2025. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1.

(2) Costanza et. al., 2014. Global Environmental Change, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.002.

(3) IPBES, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673.

(4) IUCN. 2025. https://www.iucnredlist.org/search.

(5) Pereira et. al., 2020. People and Nature, https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10146.

(6) Turner and Wills, 2022. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101180.