Exploring Pathways for Biodiversity Conservation: A Global Scenario Perspective

Biodiversity and healthy ecosystems provide services important for human well-being, for example, biomass provisioning, carbon sequestration and pollination. While land use and land use change provides food and materials for society, it is also one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. Additionally, climate change is projected to be a major issue for biodiversity loss. Consequently, there are opportunities within these sectors for transformation towards sustainability and bending the curve of biodiversity loss. Improving our understanding of the results of different actions on biodiversity is crucial for addressing and ultimately halting this decline. In this work, our aim is to identify leverage points for biodiversity conservation and restoration and to assess the interdependencies with and between biodiversity, climate change, climate and biodiversity policies. To that end we have developed a set of global scenarios that explore the implications of climate change, and various climate and biodiversity protection policies on biodiversity.

The scenarios describe different levels of transformative interventions and have been formulated with stakeholder input and guided by the Nature Futures Framework [Kim et al., 2023]. Each of the narratives stress a different aspect of possible transformative change: increasing protected areas, altering consumption patterns (including diets), ambitious climate mitigation and a combination of all three. Two variants for each of these transformations are explored: a low variant, assuming full implementation of existing policies and goals, and a high variant, projecting maximum technical potential of transformation.

These scenarios have been assessed quantitively using the IMAGE-GLOBIO modelling framework. The impacts on land use and climate derive from the IMAGE integrated assessment model [Stehfest et al., 2014], whose outputs are linked to the GLOBIO model to determine biodiversity loss [Schipper et al., 2016]. By comparing and contrasting the outcomes of the scenarios we aim to provide insights into the possible contributions of different interventions and identify appropriate leverage points for biodiversity conservation. These scenarios show that while each of the separate approaches contributes to slowing down biodiversity loss, the only scenario that manages to significantly improve biodiversity compared to current day is the scenario that combines the high variants of all measures.