Peer-reviewed publications

To inform efforts at preventing future pandemics, we assessed how socio-demographic attributes correlated with wildlife consumption as COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) first spread across Asia. Self-reported wildlife consumption was most strongly related to COVID-19 awareness; those with greater awareness were 11–24% less likely to buy wildlife products. A hypothetical intervention targeting increased awareness, support for wildlife market closures and reduced medical impacts of COVID-19 could halve future wildlife consumption rates across several countries and demographics.

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) may be both beneficial and detrimental to humans' quality of life. Since our origins, humans have been closely related to wild ungulates, which have traditionally played an outstanding role as a source of food or raw materials. Currently, wild ungulates are declining in some regions, but recovering in others throughout passive rewilding processes. This is reshaping human-ungulate interactions. Thus, adequately understanding the benefits and detriments associated with wild ungulate populations is necessary to promote human-ungulate co-existence. Here, we reviewed 575 articles (2000-2019) on human-wild ungulate interactions to identify key knowledge gaps on NCP associated with wild ungulates. Wild ungulate research was mainly distributed into seven research clusters focussing on: (1) silvicultural damage in Eurasia; (2) herbivory and natural vegetation; (3) conflicts in urban areas of North America; (4) agricultural damage in Mediterranean agro-ecosystems; (5) social research in Africa and Asia; (6) agricultural damage in North America; (7) research in natural American Northwest areas. Research mostly focused on detrimental NCP. However, the number of publications mentioning beneficial contributions increased after the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services conceptual framework was implemented. Human-ungulate interactions' research was biased towards the Global North and Cervidae, Suidae and Bovidae families. Regarding detrimental NCP, most publications referred to production damage (e.g. crops), followed by biodiversity damage, and material damage (e.g. traffic collisions). Regarding beneficial NCP, publications mainly highlighted non-material contributions (e.g. recreational hunting), followed by material NCP and regulating contributions (e.g. habitat creation). The main actions taken to manage wild ungulate populations were lethal control and using deterrents and barriers (e.g. fencing), which effectiveness was rarely assessed. Increasing research and awareness about beneficial NCP and effective management tools may help to improve the conservation of wild ungulates and the ecosystems they inhabit to facilitate people-ungulate co-existence in the Anthropocene.

Globally, shrimp farms occupied an estimated 3.490 million hectares (Mha) of land and operated 2.426 Mha of production ponds in 2018. Extensive shrimp farms used 1.804 Mha of farm area (1.377 Mha of production ponds), but produced 11.4% of global shrimp production. An estimated 1.718 Mha of land was required to produce ingredients for feeds used in semi-intensive and intensive shrimp farming, bringing total land use to 5.160 Mha. Extensive production is located in the intertidal zone and much of this land formerly was or still is in mangrove areas. Expansion of shrimp farms into mangrove areas has slowed. Mangrove areas are inferior sites for shrimp farms, and governments have imposed stricter regulations to protect mangroves. Shrimp farming in mangrove areas is unnecessary to supply the global shrimp demand. Scenarios for increasing global shrimp production without further increase in shrimp farm area are presented. But, if the demand for shrimp continues to increase, it will be impossible to freeze the total land footprint for farmed shrimp, because the land needed for feed presently is roughly equal to the direct land use for shrimp farms. Direct land use for farms can be frozen through greater production pond yields.

We calculate potential loss of free-flowing rivers (FFRs) if proposed hydropower projects are built globally. Over 260,000 km of rivers, including Amazon, Congo, Irrawaddy, and Salween mainstem rivers, would lose free-flowing status if all dams were built. We propose a set of tested and proven solutions to navigate trade-offs associated with river conservation and dam development. These solution pathways are framed within the mitigation hierarchy and include (1) avoidance through either formal river protection or through exploration of alternative development options; (2) minimization of impacts through strategic or system-scale planning or re-regulation of downstream flows; (3) restoration of rivers through dam removal; and (4) mitigation of dam impacts through biodiversity offsets that include restoration and protection of FFRs. A series of examples illustrate how avoiding or reducing impacts on rivers is possible – particularly when implemented at a system scale – and can be achieved while maintaining or expanding benefits for climate resilience, water, food, and energy security.

Land transformation reduces biodiversity and regional sustainability, with land price being an indicator of the opportunity cost to a landowner of resisting land conversion. However, reliable spatially explicit databases of current land prices are generally lacking in developing countries. We used tools from data science to scrape 1,487 georeferenced land prices in southern Kenya from the internet. Prices were higher for land near cities and in areas of high agricultural productivity, but also around the Maasai Mara National Reserve. Predicted land prices ranged from US$662 to US$4,618,805 per acre. Land speculation associated with expanding urbanization increases the opportunity and acquisition costs of maintaining conservation buffer zones, corridors, and dispersal areas. However, high land values are also found adjacent to a world-famous tourist destination. Profit-driven turnover of ownership, subdivision, and transformation of land is occurring at a rapid pace in southern Kenya, to the detriment of savanna biodiversity and the sustainability of the pastoral social–ecological system.

Several studies have estimated global inputs of plastic into the environment, relying on national statistics and modeling approaches. However, these estimates exhibit uncertainty driven by limited primary municipal solid waste management data. We compare mismanaged plastic estimates from three global studies (Jambeck et al. (2015), Lebreton and Andrady (2019), and Borrelle et al. (2020)), finding significant differences. Specifically, 58 countries show at least a 25 percentage point difference in estimated mismanagement rates, 27 countries show at least a 50 percentage point difference, and 9 countries show at least a 75 percentage point difference. Further, several top plastic generators exhibit large discrepancies in mismanagement estimates, including China, Russia, and Indonesia. The limitations of global plastic pollution estimates are well-known in the scientific community, and some variation is expected. However, these discrepancies limit policy design and mitigation. Thus, municipal, national, and international monitoring of plastic management and pollution must be improved.

Substantial efforts and investments are being made to increase the scale and improve the effectiveness of marine conservation globally. Though it is mandated by international law and central to conservation policy, less attention has been given to how to operationalize social equity in and through the pursuit of marine conservation. In this article, we aim to bring greater attention to this topic through reviewing how social equity can be better integrated in marine conservation policy and practice. Advancing social equity in marine conservation requires directing attention to: recognition through acknowledgment and respect for diverse peoples and perspectives; fair distribution of impacts through maximizing benefits and minimizing burdens; procedures through fostering participation in decision-making and good governance; management through championing and supporting local involvement and leadership; the environment through ensuring the efficacy of conservation actions and adequacy of management to ensure benefits to nature and people; and the structural barriers to and institutional roots of inequity in conservation. We then discuss the role of various conservation organizations in advancing social equity in marine conservation and identify the capacities these organizations need to build. We urge the marine conservation community, including governments, non-governmental organizations and donors, to commit to the pursuit of socially equitable conservation.

Global support is growing for the 30 × 30 movement — a goal to conserve 30% of the planet by 2030. In May, the G7 group of wealthy nations endorsed the commitment to this target that had been made by more than 50 countries in January. It is likely to be the headline goal when parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meet to discuss the latest global conservation agreement in May 2022 in Kunming, China.

So where do the sacred forests of Estonia or shipwrecks in North America’s Great Lakes come in? What do these share with managed fishing grounds in Fiji and bighorn-sheep hunting areas in Mexico? All have the potential to be recognized using a conservation policy tool called other effective area-based conservation measures, or OECMs. Together with protected areas — from Malaysia’s Taman Negara National Park to the Cerbère-Banyuls Marine Reserve in southern France — OECMs could help to achieve the 30% target.

To reverse the accelerating degradation of biodiversity and ecosystem services (‘nature’) and climate [1,2], the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will hold major meetings in 2021. We argue that, as a critical priority, countries need to design and implement integrated national strategies to achieve the goals of the three Rio Conventions (including the UN Convention to Combat Desertification—UNCCD) using spatially explicit analyses and policies. This integration can maximize co-benefits and help manage trade-offs to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nature-based solutions (NBS) provide an important framework for such integration.An advantage of our proposal is that it requires no negotiations among governments, since available convention instruments can achieve this integration. In particular, long-term low-emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) under the Paris Agreement could play a critical role by requiring a spatially explicit approach to NBS and other land uses. Moreover, China has recently introduced major domestic policy innovations that hold important lessons for designing and implementing spatially explicit policy frameworks to simultaneously pursue the objectives of Rio Conventions. We argue that countries can learn from experiences in China and elsewhere to integrate nature, climate and sustainable management of land and ocean, including targeted conservation and restoration of nature, into their LT-LEDS. We also highlight key design and implementation challenges.

Forest degradation, generally defined as a reduction in the delivery of forest ecosystem services, can have long-term impacts on biodiversity, climate, and local livelihoods. The quantification of forest degradation, its dynamics and proximate causes can help prompt early action to mitigate carbon emissions and inform relevant land use policies. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is largely forested with a relatively low deforestation rate, but anthropogenic degradation has been increasing in recent years. We assess the impact of eight independent variables related to land cover, land use, infrastructure, armed conflicts, and accessibility on forest degradation, measured by the Forest Condition (FC) index, a measure of forest degradation based on biomass history and fragmentation that ranges from 0 (completely deforested) to 100 (intact). We employ spatial panel models with fixed effects using regular 25 × 25 km units over five 3-year intervals from 2002 to 2016. The regression results suggest that the presence of swamp ecosystems, low access (defined by high travel time), and forest concessions are associated with lower forest degradation, while built up area, fire frequency, armed conflicts result in greater forest degradation. The impact of neighboring units on FC shows that all variables within the 50 km spatial neighborhood have a greater effect on FC than the on-site spatial determinants, indicating the greater influence of drivers beyond the 25 km2 unit. In the case of protected areas, we unexpectedly find that protection in neighboring locations leads to higher forest degradation, suggesting a potential leakage effect, while protected areas in the local vicinity have a positive influence on FC. The Mann-Kendall trend statistic of occurrences of fires and conflicts over the time period and until 2020 show that significant increases in conflicts and fires are spatially divergent. Overall, our results highlight how assessing the proximate causes of forest degradation with spatiotemporal analysis can support targeted interventions and policies to reduce forest degradation but spillover effects of proximal drivers in neighboring areas need to be considered.