Projecting Global Biodiversity Indicators under Future Development Scenarios

Piero Visconti,Carlo Rondinini,Detlef P Van Vuuren,Moreno Di Marco,Luigi Maiorano,Luca Santini,Lucas Joppa,Luigi Boitani,April E Reside,Robert L Pressey,Anni Arponen,Rob Alkemade,Michel Bakkenes,Michael Hoffmann,Stuart H M Butchart,Thomas Brooks,Daniele Baisero

doi:10.1111/conl.12159

Abstract

To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, governments have set strategic objectives and have adopted indicators to monitor progress toward their achievement. Projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity of different policy decisions allows decision makers to understand if and how these targets can be met. We projected trends in two widely used indicators of population abundance Geometric Mean Abundance, equivalent to the Living Planet Index and extinction risk (the Red List Index) under different climate and land-use change scenarios. Testing these on terrestrial carnivore and ungulate species, we found that both indicators decline steadily, and by 2050, under a Business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, geometric mean population abundance declines by 18–35% while extinction risk increases for 8–23% of the species, depending on assumptions about species responses to climate change. BAU will therefore fail Convention on Biological Diversity target 12 of improving the conservation status of known threatened species. An alternative sustainable development scenario reduces both extinction risk and population losses compared with BAU and could lead to population increases. Our approach to model species responses to global changes brings the focus of scenarios directly to the species level, thus taking into account an additional dimension of biodiversity and paving the way for including stronger ecological foundations into future biodiversity scenario assessments.

Highlights

Growing concerns over the loss of biodiversity and the goods and services it provides to humankind have prompted the United Nations to establish the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), to inform global environmental decision making (Brooks et al 2014)
We focused on all extant terrestrial carnivore and ungulate species of the orders Carnivora, Cetartiodactyla, Perissodactyla, and Proboscidea for which the geographic range was known and available from the IUCN (IUCN 2012b), and sufficiently large to obtain an adequate sample of presence points for fitting bioclimatic envelope models
The 18% projected GMA decline until 2050, is comparable to the rate observed in the last 40 years (Figure 3b), it does not lead to changes in Red List (RL) categories, which require an increase in the rate of decline (Figure 1d)

Summary

Introduction

Growing concerns over the loss of biodiversity and the goods and services it provides to humankind have prompted the United Nations to establish the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), to inform global environmental decision making (Brooks et al 2014). The main function of IPBES is to produce regional and global assessment on status, trends, and future scenarios of biodiversity and Conservation Letters, January/February 2016, 9(1), 5–13 Copyright and Photocopying: C 2015 The Authors Conservation Letters published by Wiley These assessments will advise on the policies required to achieve sustainable development goals, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Aichi targets for 2020 and the CBD vision for 2050. These targets have an associated set of biodiversity indicators to monitor progresses (Tittensor et al 2014). Until now, such projections measured via biodiversity indicators adopted by the CBD have been limited to a single study of Africanprotected area scenarios (Nicholson et al 2012)

Methods

Results

Conclusion