Abstract
More ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global biodiversity crisis. Here, we estimate the minimum land area to secure important sites for terrestrial fauna, ecologically intact areas, and the optimal locations for representation of species ranges and ecoregions. We discover that at least 64 million km2 (44% of terrestrial area) requires conservation attention. Over 1.8 billion people live on these lands so responses that promote agency, self-determination, equity, and sustainable management for safeguarding biodiversity are essential. Spatially explicit land-use scenarios suggest that 1.3 million km2 of land requiring conservation could be lost to intensive human land-uses by 2030, which requires immediate attention. However, there is a seven-fold difference between the amount of habitat converted under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, highlighting an opportunity to avert this crisis. Appropriate targets in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to ensure conservation of the identified land would contribute substantially to safeguarding biodiversity.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We (i) re-ran the entire analysis using updated data on the distributions of species, Key Biodiversity Areas, and protected areas, and included the best available data on reptile distributions as suggested by the reviewers. We (ii) have updated the future-land use analysis to include a scenario where we average projected loss of intact habitat across Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 1, 2, and 3, to reduce uncertainty around which pathway we are tracking in reality. We now also report the future land-use results at the coarser national level, rather than at the pixel level, to avoid inferences beyond the accuracy that the data was designed for. We (iii) ran sensitivity analyses to look at the effects of current land use on our ability to meet species targets by running the conservation prioritisation multiple times and excluding current urban areas then both urban and agricultural areas. And we (iv) have re-run the analysis using data on different taxonomic groups that are better surveyed to minimise the effect of geographical biases in the underlying data. Beyond all this, we have carried out sensitivity analyses on many aspects of the work, and are confident that our analyses are robust and support the results and conclusions. Previous bold plans to scale up nature conservation have been criticised for not considering their potential impacts on people. To avoid this, we have added a new section to the manuscript analysing the number of people potentially impacted by implementing the plan we propose. This is essential given conservations history of human rights abuses and exclusionary models. We discuss our results in the context of rights-based conservation approaches where community tenure rights and leadership in conservation are recognised. We also changed the word wilderness to ecologically intact areas throughout since wilderness still has negative connotations for many Indigenous Peoples and local communities.