Peer-reviewed publications

Land use and land use change are main drivers of biodiversity loss and degradation of a broad range of ecosystem services (MEA 2005). Despite substantial contributions to address land use impacts on biodiversity in LCA in the last decade (Schmidt 2008, de Baan et al. 2013a, Souza et al. 2013, Coelho and Michelsen 2014, LEAP 2015), including work coordinated by the UNEP SETAC Life Cycle Initiative (Milà i Canals et al. 2007; Koellner et al. 2013a; 2013b, Teixeira et al. 2016, Curran et al. 2016), no clear consensus exists on the use of a specific impact indicator. This lack of consensus not only limits the application of existing models, but also imposes constraints on the comparability of results of different studies evaluating land use impacts while applying different models. Therefore, the scope of this chapter is to give advice on defining a modeling approach and related indicator(s) adequately reflecting impacts of land use on biodiversity. The framework should be applicable on a local, regional, and global scale, and able to differentiate the diverse land use intensities as much as possible (Teixeira et al. 2016). Furthermore, it has to be linked with data availability in the life cycle inventory.

Background
Despite the connections between terrestrial and marine/freshwater livelihood strategies that we see in coastal regions across the world, the contribution of wild fisheries and fish farming is seldom considered in analyses of the global food system and is consequently underrepresented in major food security and nutrition policy initiatives. Understanding the degree to which farmers also consume fish, and how fishers also grow crops, would help to inform more resilient food security interventions.
Results
By compiling a dataset for 123,730 households across 6781 sampling clusters in 12 highly food-insecure countries, we find that between 10 and 45% of the population relies on fish for a core part of their diet. In four of our sample countries, fish-reliant households are poorer than their counterparts. Five countries show the opposite result, with fish-reliant households having higher household asset wealth. We also find that in all but two countries, fish-reliant households depend on land for farming just as much as do households not reliant on fish.

Conclusions
These results highlight the need for food security interventions that combine terrestrial and marine/freshwater programming if we are going to be successful in building a more resilient food system for the world’s most vulnerable people.

Keywords
Food security – Fish – Livelihoods – Wealth – Farming

Developing and institutionalizing cross-sectoral approaches to sustainable land use remains a crucial, yet politically contested, objective in global sustainability governance. There is a widely acknowledged need for more integrated approaches to sustainable land use that reconcile multiple landscape functions, sectors and stakeholders. However, this faces a number of challenges in practice, including the lack of policy coherence and institutional conflicts across agricultural and forest sectors. In this context, the global climate change mitigation mechanism of “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD+) has been flagged as a unique opportunity to stimulate the development and institutionalization of more integrated, “landscape” approaches to sustainable land use. In this article, we provide a reality check for the prospects of REDD+ to deliver on this promise, through analyzing three pioneer cases of REDD+ development and implementation in Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico. We analyze how REDD+ has operated in each of these three contexts, based on field work, key-informant interviews, and analysis of primary and secondary documents. Our findings suggest that REDD+ has stimulated development of “niche” sustainable land-use investments in each case, which aim to integrate forest conservation and agricultural development goals, but has done so while competing with business-as-usual incentives. We conclude that national and international political commitment to more integrated and sustainable land-use approaches is a precondition for, rather than a result of, transformative REDD+ interventions.

Larval dispersal by ocean currents is a critical component of systematic marine protected area (MPA) design. However, there is a lack of quantitative methods to incorporate larval dispersal in support of increasingly diverse management objectives, including local population persistence under multiple types of threats (primarily focused on larval retention within and dispersal between protected locations) and benefits to unprotected populations and fisheries (primarily focused on larval export from protected locations to fishing grounds). Here, we present a flexible MPA design approach that can reconcile multiple such potentially conflicting management objectives by balancing various associated treatments of larval dispersal information. We demonstrate our approach based on alternative dispersal patterns, combinations of threats to populations, management objectives, and two different optimization strategies (site vs. network-based). Our outcomes highlight a consistently high efficiency in selecting priority locations that are self-replenishing, inter-connected, and/or important larval sources. We find that the opportunity to balance these three dispersal attributes flexibly can help not only to prevent meta-population collapse, but also to ensure effective fisheries recovery, with average increases in the number of recruits at fishing grounds at least two-times higher than achieved by standard habitat-based or ad-hoc MPA designs. Future applications of our MPA design approach should therefore be encouraged, specifically where management tools other than MPAs are not feasible.

Increasingly frequent severe coral bleaching is among the greatest threats to coral reefs posed by climate change. Global climate models (GCMs) project great spatial variation in the timing of annual severe bleaching (ASB) conditions; a point at which reefs are certain to change and recovery will be limited. However, previous model-resolution projections (~1?×?1°) are too coarse to inform conservation planning. To meet the need for higher-resolution projections, we generated statistically downscaled projections (4-km resolution) for all coral reefs; these projections reveal high local-scale variation in ASB. Timing of ASB varies >10 years in 71 of the 87 countries and territories with >500?km2 of reef area. Emissions scenario RCP4.5 represents lower emissions mid-century than will eventuate if pledges made following the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21) become reality. These pledges do little to provide reefs with more time to adapt and acclimate prior to severe bleaching conditions occurring annually. RCP4.5 adds 11 years to the global average ASB timing when compared to RCP8.5; however, >75% of reefs still experience ASB before 2070 under RCP4.5. Coral reef futures clearly vary greatly among and within countries, indicating the projections warrant consideration in most reef areas during conservation and management planning.

Resource use was investigated at 34 Litopenaeus vannamei and five Penaeus monodon farms in Thailand and 30 L. vannamei and 24 P. monodon farms in Vietnam. Farms varied in water surface areas for production, reservoirs, canals, and settling basins; in pond size and depth; and in water management, stocking density, feeding rate, amendment input, aeration rate, crop duration, and crops per year. Production of L. vannamei averaged 17.3 and 10.9?m.t./ha/yr, and feed conversion ratio averaged 1.49 and 1.33 in Thailand and Vietnam, respectively. On average, production of 1?m.t. of L. vannamei required 0.58?ha land, 5,400?m3 water, 60?GJ energy, and 1218?kg wildfish in Thailand and 1.76?ha land, 15,100?m3 water, 33.7?GJ energy, and 1264?kg wildfish in Vietnam. Resource use per metric ton of shrimp declined with greater production intensity. In Thailand, P. monodon was produced at 0.2–0.4?m.t./ha/yr, with no inputs but water and postlarvae. In Vietnam, P. monodon production averaged 3.60?m.t./ha/yr. Production of 1?m.t. of P. monodon required 0.80?ha land, 36,000?m3 water, 47.8?GJ energy, and 1180?kg wildfish, and resource use per ton production declined with increasing production intensity.

The US Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulates what landowners, land managers, and industry can do on lands occupied by listed species. The ESA does this in part by requiring the designation of habitat within each listed species’ range considered critical to their recovery. Critics have argued that critical habitat (CH) designation creates significant economic costs while contributing little to species recovery. Here we examine the effects of CH designation on land cover change. We find that the rate of change from 1992 to 2011 in developed (urban and residential) and agricultural land in CH areas was not significantly different compared to similar lands without CH designation, but still subject to ESA regulations. Although CH designation on average does not affect overall rates of land cover change, CH designation did slightly modify the impact of land cover change drivers. Generally, variation in land prices played a larger role in land cover decisions within CH areas than in similar areas without CH designation. These trends suggest that developers may require a greater than typical expected return to development in CH areas to compensate for the higher risk of regulatory scrutiny. Ultimately, our results bring into question the very rationale for the CH regulation. If it is for the most part not affecting land cover choices, is CH helping species recover?

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity.

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Recent surveys suggest tens of thousands of elephants are being poached annually across Africa, putting the two species at risk across much of their range. Although the financial motivations for ivory poaching are clear, the economic benefits of elephant conservation are poorly understood. We use Bayesian statistical modelling of tourist visits to protected areas, to quantify the lost economic benefits that poached elephants would have delivered to African countries via tourism. Our results show these figures are substantial (~USD $25 million annually), and that the lost benefits exceed the anti-poaching costs necessary to stop elephant declines across the continent’s savannah areas, although not currently in the forests of central Africa. Furthermore, elephant conservation in savannah protected areas has net positive economic returns comparable to investments in sectors such as education and infrastructure. Even from a tourism perspective alone, increased elephant conservation is therefore a wise investment by governments in these regions.