Projecting terrestrial biodiversity intactness with GLOBIO 4

Abstract

Scenario‐based biodiversity modelling is a powerful approach to evaluate how possible future socio‐economic developments may affect biodiversity. Here, we evaluated the changes in terrestrial biodiversity intactness, expressed by the mean species abundance (MSA) metric, resulting from three of the shared socio‐economic pathways (SSPs) combined with different levels of climate change (according to representative concentration pathways [RCPs]): a future oriented towards sustainability (SSP1xRCP2.6), a future determined by a politically divided world (SSP3xRCP6.0) and a future with continued global dependency on fossil fuels (SSP5xRCP8.5). To this end, we first updated the GLOBIO model, which now runs at a spatial resolution of 10 arc‐seconds (~300 m), contains new modules for downscaling land use and for quantifying impacts of hunting in the tropics, and updated modules to quantify impacts of climate change, land use, habitat fragmentation and nitrogen pollution. We then used the updated model to project terrestrial biodiversity intactness from 2015 to 2050 as a function of land use and climate changes corresponding with the selected scenarios. We estimated a global area‐weighted mean MSA of 0.56 for 2015. Biodiversity intactness declined in all three scenarios, yet the decline was smaller in the sustainability scenario (−0.02) than the regional rivalry and fossil‐fuelled development scenarios (−0.06 and −0.05 respectively). We further found considerable variation in projected biodiversity change among different world regions, with large future losses particularly for sub‐Saharan Africa. In some scenario‐region combinations, we projected future biodiversity recovery due to reduced demands for agricultural land, yet this recovery was counteracted by increased impacts of other pressures (notably climate change and road disturbance). Effective measures to halt or reverse the decline of terrestrial biodiversity should not only reduce land demand (e.g. by increasing agricultural productivity and dietary changes) but also focus on reducing or mitigating the impacts of other pressures.

Future projections of biodiversity and ecosystem services in Europe with two integrated assessment models

“…The modelling team included experts from a variety of relevant physical, biological and social science disciplines who specialised in climate change, land use change, biodiversity and ecosystem services. We used two IAMs: (1) 'IMAGE-GLOBIO', combines the integrated assessment model IMAGE (Stehfest et al 2014) with the GLOBIO-3.5 biodiversity model (Alkemade et al 2009;Schipper et al 2016), and (2) 'CLIMSAVE IAP', the CLIMSAVE Integrated Assessment Platform, a regional IAM for Europe (Dunford et al 2015;Harrison et al 2016;Harrison et al 2015). Both models are capable of simulating the combined impacts of socio-economic and environmental changes (i.e.…”

“…In the present study, we aim to assess the consequences for BES in Europe under four new future socio-environmental scenarios as developed in the OpenNESS project. To that end, we used two complementary integrated assessment models (IAMs): the global IMAGE-GLOBIO model (Alkemade et al 2009;Schipper et al 2020;Stehfest et al 2014) and the European CLIMSAVE Integrated Assessment Platform (IAP) (Dunford et al 2015;Harrison et al 2016;Harrison et al 2015). This enabled us to quantify a broader set of BES indicators and to assess the consistency of the results, which in turn helps to identify factors underlying model uncertainty.…”

Potential biodiversity change in Central Asian grasslands: scenarios for the impact of climate and land-use change

“…We quantified grazing and climate change effects on biodiversity using the GLOBIO model. The core of the GLOBIO model consists of a set of quantitative relationships that assess the impacts of anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity, including climate change and land use (Alkemade et al 2009;Schipper et al 2019). Impacts are quantified based on the mean species abundance (MSA) metric, which is an indicative of local biodiversity intactness or naturalness.…”

“…An overall MSA value is calculated by multiplying the MSA values corresponding with the individual pressures 1 to m, as indicated in Eq. 2 (Schipper et al 2019):…”

“…where MSA s,i is the overall MSA for species group s in grid cell i and MSA x,s,i is the MSA corresponding with pressure x on species group s in grid cell i. Increases in individual species abundance from reference to impacted situation are truncated to avoid the indicator being inflated by opportunistic or generalist species that benefit from habitat disturbance (Schipper et al 2019). MSA values for different grazing intensities are derived from data from an extensive literature review (Alkemade et al 2009;Alkemade et al 2013).…”