Linking global drivers of agricultural trade to on-the-ground impacts on biodiversity.

Consumption of globally traded agricultural commodities like soy and palm oil is one of the primary causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss in some of the world's most species-rich ecosystems. However, the complexity of global supply chains has confounded efforts to reduce impacts. Companies and governments with sustainability commitments struggle to understand their own sourcing patterns, while the activities of more unscrupulous actors are conveniently masked by the opacity of global trade. We combine state-of-the-art material flow, economic trade, and biodiversity impact models to produce an innovative approach for understanding the impacts of trade on biodiversity loss and the roles of remote markets and actors. We do this for the production of soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, home to more than 5% of the world´s species. Distinct sourcing patterns of consumer countries and trading companies result in substantially different impacts on endemic species. Connections between individual buyers and specific hot spots explain the disproportionate impacts of some actors on endemic species and individual threatened species, such as the particular impact of European Union consumers on the recent habitat losses for the iconic giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla). In making these linkages explicit, our approach enables commodity buyers and investors to target their efforts much more closely to improve the sustainability of their supply chains in their sourcing regions while also transforming our ability to monitor the impact of such commitments over time.UK Global Food Security programme (Project 304 BB/N02060X/1

The major barriers to evidence-informed conservation policy and possible solutions.

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global survey aimed at identifying top barriers and solutions to the use of conservation science in policy. This obtained the views of 758 people in policy, practice, and research positions from 68 countries across six languages. Here we show that, contrary to popular belief, there is agreement between groups about how to incorporate conservation science into policy, and there is thus room for optimism. Barriers related to the low priority of conservation were considered to be important, while mainstreaming conservation was proposed as a key solution. Therefore, priorities should focus on convincing the public of the importance of conservation as an issue, which will then influence policy-makers to adopt pro-environmental long-term policies

Representation of Ecosystem Services by Terrestrial Protected Areas: Chile as a Case Study

<div><p>Protected areas are increasingly considered to play a key role in the global maintenance of ecosystem processes and the ecosystem services they provide. It is thus vital to assess the extent to which existing protected area systems represent those services. Here, for the first time, we document the effectiveness of the current Chilean protected area system and its planned extensions in representing both ecosystem services (plant productivity, carbon storage and agricultural production) and biodiversity. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness of protected areas based on their respective management objectives. Our results show that existing protected areas in Chile do not contain an unusually high proportion of carbon storage (14.9%), agricultural production (0.2%) or biodiversity (11.8%), and also represent a low level of plant productivity (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index of 0.38). Proposed additional priority sites enhance the representation of ecosystem services and biodiversity, but not sufficiently to attain levels of representation higher than would be expected for their area of coverage. Moreover, when the species groups were assessed separately, amphibians was the only one well represented. Suggested priority sites for biodiversity conservation, without formal protection yet, was the only protected area category that over-represents carbon storage, agricultural production and biodiversity. The low representation of ecosystem services and species’ distribution ranges by the current protected area system is because these protected areas are heavily biased toward southern Chile, and contain large extents of ice and bare rock. The designation and management of proposed priority sites needs to be addressed in order to increase the representation of ecosystem services within the Chilean protected area system.</p></div

Provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity under three protection scenarios.

<p>A ratio of >1 (in bold) indicates that an ecosystem service is over-represented compared with what would be expected for the area; values <1 indicate under-representation. The percentage of the total ecosystem services and biodiversity (summed proportion of ranges) in each of the three scenarios is given. Scenario 1: current protection system; Scenario 2: scenario 1+ suggested priority sites for biodiversity conservation; Scenario 3: scenario 2+ suggested private protected areas.</p><p>^aWeighted average of NDVI pixels within protected areas (see methods).</p

Provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity under seven protected area categories.

<p>A ratio of >1 (in bold) indicates that an ecosystem service is over-represented compared with what would be expected for the area; values <1 indicate under-representation. The percentage of the total amount of biodiversity (summed proportion of ranges) and other ecosystem services in Chile is given for each protected area category. PSBC: Priority sites for biodiversity conservation; PAs: protected areas; ‘All PA categories’ refers to the area covered by all seven categories.</p><p>*Weighted average of NDVI values that fall within each of the seven protected area categories (see methods for details).</p

Distribution of three protection scenarios.

<p>The scenarios represent alternative conservation approaches. (A) Scenario 1, (B) Scenario 2, (C) Scenario 3. PPA: Public Protected Areas (current PA system in Chile); PS: Priority Sites for Biodiversity; PvP: Private Protected Areas.</p

Ecosystem service and biodiversity distribution in Chile.

<p>Distribution of (A) net primary production, (B) carbon storage, (C) agricultural production and (D) biodiversity.</p