Degradation and forgone removals increase the carbon impact of intact forest loss by 626%

Intact tropical forests, free from substantial anthropogenic influence, store and sequester large amounts of atmospheric carbon but are currently neglected in international climate policy. We show that between 2000 and 2013, direct clearance of intact tropical forest areas accounted for 3.2% of gross carbon emissions from all deforestation across the pantropics. However, full carbon accounting requires the consideration of forgone carbon sequestration, selective logging, edge effects, and defaunation. When these factors were considered, the net carbon impact resulting from intact tropical forest loss between 2000 and 2013 increased by a factor of 6 (626%), from 0.34 (0.37 to 0.21) to 2.12 (2.85 to 1.00) petagrams of carbon (equivalent to approximately 2 years of global land use change emissions). The climate mitigation value of conserving the 549 million ha of tropical forest that remains intact is therefore significant but will soon dwindle if their rate of loss continues to accelerate

Linking biodiversity into national economic accounting

Biodiversity underpins the supply of ecosystem services essential for well-being and economic development, yet biodiversity loss continues at a substantial rate. Linking biodiversity indicators with national economic accounts provides a means of mainstreaming biodiversity into economic planning and monitoring processes. Here we examine the various strategies for biodiversity indicators to be linked into national economic accounts, specifically the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA) framework. We present what has been achieved in practice, using various case studies from across the world. These case studies demonstrate the potential of economic accounting as an integrating, mainstreaming framework that explicitly considers biodiversity. With the right indicators for the different components of biodiversity and scales of biological organisation, this can directly support more holistic economic planning approaches. This will be a significant step forward from relying on the traditional indicators of national economic accounts to guide national planning. It is also essential if society’s objectives for biodiversity and sustainable development are to be met

Threatened ecosystems of Myanmar. An IUCN Red List of ecosystems assessment. Version 1.0.

[Excerpt:] Myanmar's Red List of Ecosystems is a tool to understand our threats and plan for conservation and sustainable management. Forests constitute the dominant ecosystems in Myanmar, and we are blessed with high forest cover (42.92%) and diversity, with 36 of our 64 ecosystems identified as forest and mangrove. These forests and biodiversity underpin a range of ecosystem services which are central to Myanmar’s sustainable development, supporting human and resource needs, and contributing to a more stable climate. The loss of forests and our biodiversity leads to degradation and deterioration of ecosystem services and threatens Myanmar’s irreplaceable ecological heritage. We often discuss ecosystem services but this study documents Myanmar’s terrestrial ecosystem typology and spatial distribution for the first time. This is one of the first ecosystem red lists developed within ASEAN and this will inform our implementation for decades to come to inform legislation, land-use planning, protected area expansion, monitoring and reporting, and ecosystem management. To sustain our forests and our biodiversity we need to sustainably manage all of these incredible ecosystems

Response: Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities?

[Extract] In an attempt to identify areas of the world that represent outstanding examples of ecological integrity, Plumptre et al. (2021) concluded that just 2.8% of Earth's terrestrial area could be considered to qualify. This analysis contrasts with other global assessments that show the extent of areas important for ecological integrity to be at least an order of magnitude higher (Newbold et al., 2016; Watson et al., 2016a; Beyer et al., 2020; Grantham et al., 2020; Hansen et al., 2020; Mokany et al., 2020; Riggio et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2020; De Palma et al., 2021). Plumptre et al. (2021) further argue their methodology and findings can inform Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) delineation

Diversification of refugia types needed to secure the future of coral reefs subject to climate change

Identifying locations of refugia from the thermal stresses of climate change for coral reefs and better managing them is one of the key recommendations for climate change adaptation. We review and summarize approximately 30 years of applied research focused on identifying climate refugia to prioritize the conservation actions for coral reefs under rapid climate change. We found that currently proposed climate refugia and the locations predicted to avoid future coral losses are highly reliant on excess heat metrics, such as degree heating weeks. However, many existing alternative environmental, ecological, and life-history variables could be used to identify other types of refugia that lead to the desired diversified portfolio for coral reef conservation. To improve conservation priorities for coral reefs, there is a need to evaluate and validate the predictions of climate refugia with long-term field data on coral abundance, diversity, and functioning. There is also the need to identify and safeguard locations displaying resistance toprolonged exposure to heat waves and the ability to recover quickly after thermal exposure. We recommend using more metrics to identify a portfolio of potential refugia sites for coral reefs that can avoid, resist, and recover from exposure to high ocean temperatures and the consequences of climate change, thereby shifting past efforts focused on avoidance to a diversified risk-spreading portfolio that can be used to improve strategic coral reef conservation in a rapidly warming climate

Scaling up area-based conservation to implement the Global Biodiversity Framework's 30x30 target: The role of Nature's Strongholds

The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), signed in 2022 by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, recognized the importance of area-based conservation, and its goals and targets specify the characteristics of protected and conserved areas (PCAs) that disproportionately contribute to biodiversity conservation. To achieve the GBF's target of conserving a global area of 30% by 2030, this Essay argues for recognizing these characteristics and scaling them up through the conservation of areas that are: extensive (typically larger than 5,000 km 2); have interconnected PCAs (either physically or as part of a jurisdictional network, and frequently embedded in larger conservation landscapes); have high ecological integrity; and are effectively managed and equitably governed. These areas are presented as "Nature's Strongholds," illustrated by examples from the Congo and Amazon basins. Conserving Nature's Strongholds offers an approach to scale up initiatives to address global threats to biodiversity.Additional authors: Emma Stokes; Joe Walston; James EM Watso

Scaling up area-based conservation to implement the Global Biodiversity Framework's 30x30 target: The role of Nature's Strongholds

The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), signed in 2022 by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, recognized the importance of area-based conservation, and its goals and targets specify the characteristics of protected and conserved areas (PCAs) that disproportionately contribute to biodiversity conservation. To achieve the GBF's target of conserving a global area of 30% by 2030, this Essay argues for recognizing these characteristics and scaling them up through the conservation of areas that are: extensive (typically larger than 5,000 km 2); have interconnected PCAs (either physically or as part of a jurisdictional network, and frequently embedded in larger conservation landscapes); have high ecological integrity; and are effectively managed and equitably governed. These areas are presented as "Nature's Strongholds," illustrated by examples from the Congo and Amazon basins. Conserving Nature's Strongholds offers an approach to scale up initiatives to address global threats to biodiversity

Spatial priorities for conserving the most intact biodiverse forests within Central Africa

The forests of Central Africa contain some of Earth's few remaining intact forests. These forests are increasingly threatened by infrastructure development, agriculture, and unsustainable extraction of natural resources (e.g. minerals, bushmeat, and timber), all of which is leading to deforestation and forest degradation, particularly defaunation, and hence causing declines in biodiversity and a significant increase in carbon emissions. Given the pervasive nature of these threats, the global importance of Central African forests for biodiversity conservation, and the limited resources for conservation and sustainable management, there is a need to identify where the most important areas are to orientate conservation efforts. We developed a novel approach for identifying spatial priorities where conservation efforts can maximize biodiversity benefits within Central Africa's most intact forest areas. We found that the Democratic Republic of Congo has the largest amount of priority areas in the region, containing more than half, followed by Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Cameroon. We compared our approach to one that solely prioritizes forest intactness and one that aims to achieve only biodiversity representation objectives. We found that when priorities are only based on forest intactness (without considering biodiversity representation), there are significantly fewer biodiversity benefits and vice versa. We therefore recommend multi-objective planning that includes biodiversity representation and forest intactness to ensure that both objectives are maximized. These results can inform various types of conservation strategies needed within the region, including land-use planning, jurisdictional REDD + initiatives, and performance related carbon payments, protected area expansion, community forest management, and forest concession plans

Effectiveness of Biodiversity Surrogates for Conservation Planning: Different Measures of Effectiveness Generate a Kaleidoscope of Variation

Conservation planners represent many aspects of biodiversity by using surrogates with spatial distributions readily observed or quantified, but tests of their effectiveness have produced varied and conflicting results. We identified four factors likely to have a strong influence on the apparent effectiveness of surrogates: (1) the choice of surrogate; (2) differences among study regions, which might be large and unquantified (3) the test method, that is, how effectiveness is quantified, and (4) the test features that the surrogates are intended to represent. Analysis of an unusually rich dataset enabled us, for the first time, to disentangle these factors and to compare their individual and interacting influences. Using two data-rich regions, we estimated effectiveness using five alternative methods: two forms of incidental representation, two forms of species accumulation index and irreplaceability correlation, to assess the performance of ‘forest ecosystems’ and ‘environmental units’ as surrogates for six groups of threatened species—the test features—mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, plants and all of these combined. Four methods tested the effectiveness of the surrogates by selecting areas for conservation of the surrogates then estimating how effective those areas were at representing test features. One method measured the spatial match between conservation priorities for surrogates and test features. For methods that selected conservation areas, we measured effectiveness using two analytical approaches: (1) when representation targets for the surrogates were achieved (incidental representation), or (2) progressively as areas were selected (species accumulation index). We estimated the spatial correlation of conservation priorities using an index known as summed irreplaceability. In general, the effectiveness of surrogates for our taxa (mostly threatened species) was low, although environmental units tended to be more effective than forest ecosystems. The surrogates were most effective for plants and mammals and least effective for frogs and reptiles. The five testing methods differed in their rankings of effectiveness of the two surrogates in relation to different groups of test features. There were differences between study areas in terms of the effectiveness of surrogates for different test feature groups. Overall, the effectiveness of the surrogates was sensitive to all four factors. This indicates the need for caution in generalizing surrogacy tests