Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences最新文献

Adaptation to climate change is a social-ecological process: it is not solely a result of natural processes or human decisions but emerges from multiple relations within social systems, within ecological systems and between them. We propose a novel analytical framework to evaluate social-ecological relations in nature-based adaptation, encompassing social (people-people), ecological (nature-nature) and social-ecological (people-nature) relations. Applying this framework to 25 case studies, we analyse the associations among these relations and identify archetypes of social-ecological adaptation. Our findings revealed that adaptation actions with more people-nature relations mobilize more social and ecological relations. We identified four archetypes, with distinct modes of adaptation along a gradient of people-nature interaction scores, summarized as: (i) nature control; (ii) biodiversity-based; (iii) ecosystem services-based; and (iv) integrated approaches. This study contributes to a nuanced understanding of nature-based adaptation, highlighting the importance of integrating diverse relations across social and ecological systems. Our findings offer valuable insights for informing the design and implementation of adaptation strategies and policies.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

The Red List Index (RLI) is an indicator of the average extinction risk of groups of species and reflects trends in this through time. It is calculated from the number of species in each category on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with trends influenced by the number moving between categories when reassessed owing to genuine improvement or deterioration in status. The global RLI is aggregated across multiple taxonomic groups and can be disaggregated to show trends for subsets of species (e.g. migratory species), or driven by particular factors (e.g. international trade). National RLIs have been generated through either repeated assessments of national extinction risk in each country or through disaggregating the global index and weighting each species by the proportion of its range in each country. The RLI has achieved wide policy uptake, including by the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Future priorities include expanding its taxonomic coverage, applying the RLI to the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, incorporating uncertainty in the underlying Red List assessments, integrating into national RLIs the impact of a country on species' extinction risk abroad, and improving analysis of the factors driving trends.This article is part of the discussion theme issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

Georgina Mace proposed bending the curve of biodiversity loss as a fitting ambition for the Convention on Biological Diversity. The new Global Biodiversity Monitoring Framework (GBMF) may increase the chances of meeting the goals and targets in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), which requires bending the curve. To meet the outcome goals of KMGBF, the GBMF should support adaptive policy responses to the state of biodiversity, which in turn requires a 'satnav' for nature. The twin pillars of such a satnav are (i) models to predict expected future outcomes of today's choices; and (ii) rapid feedback from monitoring to enable course corrections and model improvement. These same elements will also empower organizations to ensure that their actions are truly nature-positive, but they are not yet written into the GBMF. Without a satnav, society will effectively have to try to find its way to the outcome goals by looking in the rear-view mirror that the current headline indicators provide. Drawing contrasts and parallels with climate modelling, I discuss challenges for indicators, models, data and research culture that must be overcome if we are to bend the curve, and suggest ways forward.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

Food production does more damage to wild species than any other sector of human activity, yet how best to limit its growing impact is greatly contested. Reviewing progress to date in interventions that encourage less damaging diets or cut food loss and waste, we conclude that both are essential but far from sufficient. In terms of production, field studies from five continents quantifying the population-level impacts of land sharing, land sparing, intermediate and mixed approaches for almost 2000 individually assessed species show that implementing high-yield farming to spare natural habitats consistently outperforms land sharing, particularly for species of highest conservation concern. Sparing also offers considerable potential for mitigating climate change. Delivering land sparing nevertheless raises several important challenges-in particular, identifying and promoting higher yielding farm systems that are less environmentally harmful than current industrial agriculture, and devising mechanisms to limit rebound effects and instead tie yield gains to habitat conservation. Progress will depend on conservationists forging novel collaborations with the agriculture sector. While this may be challenging, we suggest that without it there is no realistic prospect of slowing biodiversity loss.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a leading global biodiversity indicator based on vertebrate population time series. Since it was first developed over 25 years ago, the LPI has been widely used to indicate trends in biodiversity globally, primarily reported every two years in the Living Planet Report. Based on relative abundance, a sensitive metric of biodiversity change, the LPI has also been applied as a tool for informing policy and used in assessments for several multilateral conventions and agreements, including the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010 Biodiversity Target and Aichi targets. Here, we outline all current and some potential uses of the LPI as a policy tool and explore the use of the LPI in policy documents to assess the reach of the LPI geographically and over time. We present limitations to the use of this indicator in policy, primarily relating to the development of the index at the national level, and suggest clear pathways to broaden the utility of the LPI and the underlying database for temporal and spatial predictions of biodiversity change. We also provide evidence that the LPI can detect recoveries in biodiversity and suggest its suitability for measuring progress towards the goal of biodiversity recovery by 2050.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework recognizes the importance of the private sector monitoring, assessing and disclosing biodiversity-related risks, dependencies and impacts. Many businesses and financial institutions are progressing with science-based assessments, targets and disclosures and integrating into strategy, risk management and capital allocation decisions. Developments will continue in response to investor expectations, emerging corporate sustainability reporting regulations in Europe, China and elsewhere and evolving global sustainability reporting standards. Voluntary action is also being encouraged by the disclosure recommendations of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the target-setting methods of the Science Based Targets Network. Based on experience supporting the private sector in practice, we identify four critical science and technical advances needed to enable business action at scale and to redirect finance globally to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. First, consensus on indicators and metrics for measuring changes in the state of nature and provision of ecosystem services. Second, access to global, regularly updated, location-specific and consistent nature data. Third, standardized and consistent accounting systems that structure data, support risk management and create accountability at corporate, ecosystem and national levels. Fourth, integrated risk assessment approaches to help corporates, financial institutions, central banks and supervisors to assess nature-related risks.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

The partitioning of global biodiversity into biogeographic regions is critical for understanding the impacts of global-scale ecological and evolutionary processes on species assemblages as well as prioritizing areas for conservation. However, the lack of globally comprehensive data on species distributions precludes fine-scale estimation of biogeographical regionalization for numerous taxa of ecological, economic and conservation interest. Using a recently published phylogeny and novel curated native range maps for over 10 000 species of butterflies around the world, we delineated biogeographic regions for the world's butterflies using phylogenetic dissimilarity. We uncovered 19 distinct phylogenetically delimited regions (phyloregions) nested within 6 realms. Regional boundaries were predicted by spatial turnover in modern-day temperature and precipitation seasonality, but historical climate change also left a pronounced fingerprint on deeper- (realm-) level boundaries. We use a culturally and ecologically important group of insects to expand our understanding of how historical and contemporary factors drive the distribution of organismal lineages on the Earth. As insects and global biodiversity more generally face unprecedented challenges from anthropogenic factors, our research provides the groundwork for prioritizing regions and taxa for conservation, especially with the goal of preserving the legacies of our biosphere's evolutionary history.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

A key issue in predicting how ecosystems will respond to environmental change is understanding why populations and communities are able to live and reproduce in some parts of ecological and geographical space, but not in others. The limits to adaptation that cause ecological niches to vary in position and width across taxa and environmental contexts determine how communities and ecosystems emerge from selection on phenotypes and genomes. Ecological trade-offs mean that phenotypes can only be optimal in some environments unless these trade-offs can be reshaped through evolution. However, the amount and rate of evolution are limited by genetic architectures, developmental systems (including phenotypic plasticity) and the legacies of recent evolutionary history. Here, we summarize adaptive limits and their ecological consequences in time (evolutionary rescue) and space (species' range limits), relating theoretical predictions to empirical tests. We then highlight key avenues for future research in this area, from better connections between evolution and demography to analysing the genomic architecture of adaptation, the dynamics of plasticity and interactions between the biotic and abiotic environment. Progress on these questions will help us understand when and where evolution and phenotypic plasticity will allow species and communities to persist in the face of rapid environmental change.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

Africa boasts high biodiversity while also being home to some of the largest and fastest-growing human populations. Although the current environmental footprint of Africa is low compared to other continents, the population of Africa is estimated at around 1.5 billion inhabitants, representing nearly 18% of the world's total population. Consequently, Africa's rich biodiversity is under threat, yet only 19% of the landscape and 17% of the seascape are under any form of protection. To effectively address this issue and align with the Convention on Biological Diversity's ambitious '30 by 30' goal, which seeks to protect 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030, substantial funding and conservation measures are urgently required. In response to this critical challenge, as scientists and conservationists working in Africa, we propose five recommendations for future directions aimed at enhancing biodiversity conservation for the betterment of African society: (i) accelerate data collection, data sharing and analytics for informed policy and decision-making; (ii) innovate education and capacity building for future generations; (iii) enhance and expand protected areas, ecological networks and foundational legal frameworks; (iv) unlock creative funding channels for cutting-edge conservation initiatives; and (v) integrate indigenous and local knowledge into forward-thinking conservation strategies. By implementing these recommendations, we believe Africa can make significant strides towards preserving its unique biodiversity, while fostering a healthier society, and contributing to global conservation efforts.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.

Human-driven habitat loss is recognized as the greatest cause of the biodiversity crisis, yet to date we lack robust, spatially explicit metrics quantifying the impacts of anthropogenic changes in habitat extent on species' extinctions. Existing metrics either fail to consider species identity or focus solely on recent habitat losses. The persistence score approach developed by Durán et al. (Durán et al. 2020 Methods Ecol. Evol. 11, 910-921 (doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13427) represented an important development by combining species' ecologies and land-cover data while considering the cumulative and non-linear impact of past habitat loss on species' probability of extinction. However, it is computationally demanding, limiting its global use and application. Here we couple the persistence score approach with high-performance computing to generate global maps of what we term the LIFE (Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions) metric for 30 875 species of terrestrial vertebrates at 1 arc-min resolution (3.4 km² at the equator). These maps provide quantitative estimates, for the first time, of the marginal changes in the expected number of extinctions (both increases and decreases) caused by converting remaining natural vegetation to agriculture, and restoring farmland to natural habitat. We demonstrate statistically that this approach integrates information on species richness, endemism and past habitat loss. Our resulting maps can be used at scales from 0.5-1000 km² and offer unprecedented opportunities to estimate the impact on extinctions of diverse actions that affect change in land cover, from individual dietary choices through to global protected area development.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bending the curve towards nature recovery: building on Georgina Mace's legacy for a biodiverse future'.