Supporting the Global Biodiversity Framework Monitoring with LUI, the Land Use Intensity Indicator

Abstract

Biodiversity loss has been identified as the environmental impact where humankind has been trespassing planetary boundaries most ruthlessly. Going beyond the pressures causing damages and analysing their un-derlying driving forces, ipbes identified a series of drivers. The Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework GBF is intended to and claims to be a policy response to such analyses. To enhance the resilience of ecological systems, to allow for their recovery and enable the restoration efforts foreseen in the GBF to be successful, the pressures/direct drivers have to be reduced and the drivers/indirect drivers of biodiversity loss have to be redirected. However, often the necessary (semi-)quantitative infor-mation needed to politically address the drivers is absent or patchy. The data collected under the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting, to which the GBF is affiliated, monitors the state of ecosystems, with no priority for pressure/direct driver analysis. Hence we suggest LUI, a deliberately simple index designed for two purposes, as a tool for communicating where sophisticated statistics are available, and as an information collection tool elsewhere Its simple and intuitively understandable structure makes it suitable for citizens’ science applications, and thus for partici-pative monitoring when extensive statistical data gathering is not feasible.