Spatial Conservation Prioritization for Land in Megacity Facing Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Abstract

Climate change and biodiversity loss are two major threats to the world. Ecosystem conservation is an important issue for humanity, and international intergovernmental science-policy platforms highlight the mutually beneficial relationships among biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services and measures to mitigate climate change. Rapid urbanization has brought various deeply interconnected ecological problems to large cities. Therefore, key areas for conservation must be identified in an integrative manner to maximize conservation effectiveness and meet both ecological and human social needs. Spatial conservation prioritization provides a way to consider different functional needs as a whole in light of certain objectives while highlighting their contradictions and overlaps in spatial utilization. The megacity of Beijing continues to experience frequent extreme weather events despite the implementation of a series of ecological restoration measures. We integrated the potential distributions of 64 critically endangered native species to represent biodiversity and used five main ecosystem services required for climate governance to represent ecosystem services in the city. Using the spatial prioritization software Zonation 5, we assessed the spatial distribution of conservation priorities at the municipal scale and changes in conservation effectiveness in four protection scenarios. The results showed that the existing PAs in Beijing could protect 24.99% of the current distribution of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The conservation effectiveness can reach 78.75% when the PAs are increased to 30%. This efficiency rate is 4.46% lower than that of the optimal scenario, which does not consider the existing PAs. An emphasis on urban rewilding spaces may be the key to overcoming conservation bottlenecks to further enhance the efficiency of ecological conservation. To achieve future conservation targets, policy development may start with urban built-up areas.