Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050
In the last century, land-use changes have been the main driver of biodiversity loss across the globe. A new modelling study published in April 2024 by a large collaboration of researchers shows, however, that climate change is likely to become a dominant driver of biodiversity loss by 2050. Thus, the study demonstrates the interlinkages between environmental issues and the need for urgent climate mitigation in parallel with other initiatives aimed at halting terrestrial biodiversity loss. The study concludes:
“Countries are currently faced with implementing ambitious goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. According to this framework, extinctions of known threatened species should be halted by 2050, and extinction rates of all species should be reduced 10-fold. In addition, declining ecosystem services should be restored by 2050. The global sustainability scenario comes close to achieving extinction rate targets when only considering land-use change effects, but even the modest climate change in this scenario leads to accelerated extinctions.” (Pereira et al., 2024).
Combining results from thirteen different models, the authors assessed biodiversity loss across three scenarios based on the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP) and the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This showed that if only considering land-use effects, global sustainability scenarios are well on track – however, climate change is likely to undermine these efforts.
Besides showing that less ambitious climate mitigation pathways lead to larger biodiversity losses, the models also highlighted important regional differences. Focusing here on biodiversity change in response to land-use change, high emission scenarios indicate large biodiversity losses especially in South America, Central Africa, East Africa, and South Asia.
The article “Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050” was published in Science, April 25th, 2024.
