Global responses in biodiversity and ecosystem services to future land use change

The sustainability of biodiversity and ecosystem services – critical to human well-being in the coming century – is severely threatened by global change drivers. By understanding the shape and speed of biodiversity and ecosystem service responses to these drivers, we can manage trade-offs between them and identify future hotspots. Here, we focus on land use change, as perhaps the most pervasive driver of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss, with wide-ranging impacts, both immediate and over time.

We use space-for-time substitution to model the relationship of urban and agricultural land use to 30 indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem services across global biomes. Our results indicate differing trajectories – in general provisioning services and the usage of other services show clear increasing trends with land use. However, biodiversity indicators and regulating service supply show declines or thresholds as land use increases. The strongest relationships are found in tropical and temperate biomes. We then explore if incorporating historical land use change into our models can better predict current biodiversity and ecosystem services due to the potential time lags in impacts. This resulted in an improvement in the majority of models (85%), but these improvements were generally small.

Finally, we apply land use projections from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios to our more robust models to predict future changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services. The biggest differences were found between SSP1 (sustainability) and SSP3 (regional rivalry), most prominently in central and southern Africa and southeast Asia. Inflection points were present beyond 2050, meaning several indicators switched from gains to loses, particularly with the SSP5 (fossil fuelled) scenario. Taken together, our findings show the potential for developing robust biodiversity and ecosystem service trajectories at the biome extent; that incorporating historical land use change can improve these trajectories; and that such trajectories can highlight areas of potential future losses.