Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.

International commitments for ecosystem restoration add up to one-quarter of the world's arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here, we present a restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options. Using an actual large-scale restoration target of the Atlantic Forest hotspot, we show that our approach can deliver an eightfold increase in cost-effectiveness for biodiversity conservation compared with a baseline of non-systematic restoration. A compromise solution avoids 26% of the biome's current extinction debt of 2,864 plant and animal species (an increase of 257% compared with the baseline). Moreover, this solution sequesters 1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (a 105% increase) while reducing costs by US$28 billion (a 57% decrease). Seizing similar opportunities elsewhere would offer substantial contributions to some of the greatest challenges for humankind

Author Correction: Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs (Nature Ecology & Evolution, (2019), 3, 1, (62-70), 10.1038/s41559-018-0743-8)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper

Visions for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century : Report from an IPBES visioning workshop held on 4-8 September 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand

Existing scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) have important limitations and gaps that constrain their usefulness for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Specifically, they fail to incorporate policy objectives related to nature conservation and social-ecological feedbacks, they do not address the linkages between biodiversity and ecosystem services, and they are typically relevant at only a particular spatial scale. In addition, nature and its benefits are treated as the consequence of human decisions, but are not at the centre of the analysis. To address these issues, the IPBES Scenarios and Models Expert Group initiated the development of a set of Multiscale Scenarios for Nature Futures based on positive visions for human relationships with nature.The first step of this process was a visioning workshop with stakeholders and experts on 4-8 September 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 73 participants from inter-governmental organisations, national government organisations, non-governmental organisations, academia and the private sector, from 31 countries, and with a range of sectoral expertise on biodiversity topics, from urban development to agriculture to fisheries, worked together in a visioning exercise. This report documents the results from this visioning workshop to inform further stakeholder consultation and the development of the associated multiscale scenarios by modelers and experts. This creative visioning exercise was carried out in four steps based on a suite of participatory methods that were used to develop visions of alternative futures. First the participants identified important themes to develop the visions. Next, thematic groups identified the main trends for BES in each theme and a set of “Seeds” of emerging initiatives leading to positive futures for our relationship with nature. Implications of what would happen across a range of sectors were identified for each seed. Then a pathway analysis of how the current regime in each theme may be transformed into the future desirable regime was carriedout. Narratives were then built for the visions emerging from each group. Finally, commonalities of visions across the groups were identified, and the regional relevance of each vision for different parts of the world was assessed

Visions for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century : Report from an IPBES visioning workshop held on 4-8 September 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand

Existing scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) have important limitations and gaps that constrain their usefulness for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Specifically, they fail to incorporate policy objectives related to nature conservation and social-ecological feedbacks, they do not address the linkages between biodiversity and ecosystem services, and they are typically relevant at only a particular spatial scale. In addition, nature and its benefits are treated as the consequence of human decisions, but are not at the centre of the analysis. To address these issues, the IPBES Scenarios and Models Expert Group initiated the development of a set of Multiscale Scenarios for Nature Futures based on positive visions for human relationships with nature.The first step of this process was a visioning workshop with stakeholders and experts on 4-8 September 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 73 participants from inter-governmental organisations, national government organisations, non-governmental organisations, academia and the private sector, from 31 countries, and with a range of sectoral expertise on biodiversity topics, from urban development to agriculture to fisheries, worked together in a visioning exercise. This report documents the results from this visioning workshop to inform further stakeholder consultation and the development of the associated multiscale scenarios by modelers and experts. This creative visioning exercise was carried out in four steps based on a suite of participatory methods that were used to develop visions of alternative futures. First the participants identified important themes to develop the visions. Next, thematic groups identified the main trends for BES in each theme and a set of “Seeds” of emerging initiatives leading to positive futures for our relationship with nature. Implications of what would happen across a range of sectors were identified for each seed. Then a pathway analysis of how the current regime in each theme may be transformed into the future desirable regime was carriedout. Narratives were then built for the visions emerging from each group. Finally, commonalities of visions across the groups were identified, and the regional relevance of each vision for different parts of the world was assessed