Systemic knowledge for biodiversity, climate, and the agri-food system within planetary boundaries: biodiversity-based approaches

The Planetary Health Check 2025 revealed that we have already breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Moreover, both biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people continue to decline globally, underscoring the need for urgent transformative action. In this context, the interface between biodiversity, climate, agriculture and food supply and consumption represents a critical common area of action and conflict, within which innovations for societal transformations towards systemic sustainability can be identified. The core question remains: How can we protect biodiversity at local, national, and global scales, while minimising global climate change, and simultaneously achieving resilient agriculture for food security? A systemic perspective on these topics is critical because it can reveal the complex interlinkages between related societal dynamics and biophysical processes, conflicting goals and implementation problems, and help identify coordinated solutions for sustainability transformations. To better understand the role of biodiversity at the interface, we analyse projected changes in biodiversity indicators relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals and the biodiversity targets formulated in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework across future land-use and climate-change scenarios with the purpose of identifying potential future hotspots of biodiversity risk at different scales. We are particularly interested in species associated with agricultural areas, both those that impact and those that are impacted by agricultural land use. We will set the analytical outcomes of these biodiversity analyses into the context of integrated quantifications of different planetary boundaries across spatial scales. Furthermore, we will complement these analyses with advancements in spatially explicit crop yield forecasting, which are crucial for a better understanding of agri-food-environment interactions across scales and can help identify more sustainable agricultural management scenarios. We embed the outcomes of these different analyses within a systemic perspective on sustainability to create systemic knowledge for sustainable, transformative pathways at the interface between biodiversity, climate, agriculture and food.