Set a global target for ecosystems

Watson, James; Keith, David A.; Strassburg, Bernardo B. N.; Venter, Oscar; Williams, Brooke A.; Nicholson, Emily

doi:10.1038/d41586-020-00446-1

Cited by 61 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…We urgently need SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals, targets, and indicators for maintaining and restoring forest integrity that directly feeds into higher-level biodiversity, climate, land degradation, and sustainable development goals 48 . Forest specific targets could be included within an over-arching target on ecosystems within the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, which is currently being negotiated among Parties to the CBD 49 . This target needs to be outcomefocused and address both the extent and the integrity of ecosystems (e.g., using FLII for forests), in a way that enables quantitative, measurable goals to be set and reported on, but allows flexibility for implementation between Parties.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

et al. 2020

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Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index of lost connectivity, we generate a globally consistent, continuous index of forest condition as determined by the degree of anthropogenic modification. Globally, only 17.4 million km2 of forest (40.5%) has high landscape-level integrity (mostly found in Canada, Russia, the Amazon, Central Africa, and New Guinea) and only 27% of this area is found in nationally designated protected areas. Of the forest inside protected areas, only 56% has high landscape-level integrity. Ambitious policies that prioritize the retention of forest integrity, especially in the most intact areas, are now urgently needed alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and restoring the integrity of forests globally.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

et al. 2020

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“…There is an urgent need for an international, targeted, and well-coordinated action plan for the conservation of global ecosystems (Watson et al, 2020). Actions for environmental preservation are mainly focused on the protection of threatened species and mitigation of climate change.…”

Section: Conservation Of Ecosystems As a Public Health Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Control and prevention of infectious diseases from a One Health perspective

et al. 2021

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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caught the attention of the global community and rekindled the debate about our ability to prevent and manage outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. Many alternatives are suggested to address these urgent issues. Some of them are quite interesting, but with little practical application in the short or medium term. To realistically control infectious diseases, human, animal, and environmental factors need to be considered together, based on the One Health perspective. In this article, we highlight the most effective initiatives for the control and prevention of infectious diseases: vaccination; environmental sanitation; vector control; social programs that encourage a reduction in the population growth; control of urbanization; safe sex stimulation; testing; treatment of sexually and vertically transmitted infections; promotion of personal hygiene practices; food safety and proper nutrition; reduction of the human contact with wildlife and livestock; reduction of social inequalities; infectious disease surveillance; and biodiversity preservation. Subsequently, this article highlights the impacts of human genetics on susceptibility to infections and disease progression, using the SARS-CoV-2 infection as a study model. Finally, actions focused on mitigation of outbreaks and epidemics and the importance of conservation of ecosystems and translational ecology as public health strategies are also discussed.

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“…Taking climate change into account as an up-front challenge for biodiversity affects the formulation of new biodiversity targets (71), the balance between biodiversity-focused adaptation and ecosystem-based adaptation (72,73), and their interactions with other sustainable development objectives, as well as the measures that will be nationally and locally implemented to achieve these. "Bending the curve" of biodiversity loss (73) and the ambition to retain, restore, and protect natural ecosystems (72) will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, unless climate change is considered explicitly as a main threat to biodiversity and ecosystems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-2020 biodiversity targets need to embrace climate change

Arneth

Shin

Leadley

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

190

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Recent assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have highlighted the risks to humanity arising from the unsustainable use of natural resources. Thus far, land, freshwater, and ocean exploitation have been the chief causes of biodiversity loss. Climate change is projected to be a rapidly increasing additional driver for biodiversity loss. Since climate change and biodiversity loss impact human societies everywhere, bold solutions are required that integrate environmental and societal objectives. As yet, most existing international biodiversity targets have overlooked climate change impacts. At the same time, climate change mitigation measures themselves may harm biodiversity directly. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 framework offers the important opportunity to address the interactions between climate change and biodiversity and revise biodiversity targets accordingly by better aligning these with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. We identify the considerable number of existing and proposed post-2020 biodiversity targets that risk being severely compromised due to climate change, even if other barriers to their achievement were removed. Our analysis suggests that the next set of biodiversity targets explicitly addresses climate change-related risks since many aspirational goals will not be feasible under even lower-end projections of future warming. Adopting more flexible and dynamic approaches to conservation, rather than static goals, would allow us to respond flexibly to changes in habitats, genetic resources, species composition, and ecosystem functioning and leverage biodiversity’s capacity to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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Set a global target for ecosystems

Cited by 61 publications

References 18 publications

Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

Control and prevention of infectious diseases from a One Health perspective

Post-2020 biodiversity targets need to embrace climate change

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