Peer-reviewed publications

Nature’s contributions to people (NCP) are increasingly incorporated in modern conservation policy and management frameworks; however, the contributions of wildlife remain underrepresented in the NCP science that informs policy and practice. In this Perspective, we explore wildlife’s role in NCP. We use existing evidence to map wildlife contributions onto the conceptual framework of NCP and find that wildlife directly supports 12 of 18 NCP categories. We identify NCP provided or supported by wildlife as wildlife’s contributions to people (WCP). Knowledge gaps regarding WCP are prevalent, and failure to identify or account for WCP in policy and management could prevent both NCP and biodiversity targets from being achieved. To improve understanding of WCP and its integration into conservation decision-making, advances in monitoring and modelling wildlife are required and taxonomic, geographic and cultural biases in existing research should be addressed. These advances are necessary to connect biodiversity policies aimed at protecting wildlife species with NCP policies intended to ensure the long-term delivery of benefits to people, and to achieve widespread sustainable relationships with nature.

In response to global declines in biodiversity, many global conservation prioritization schemes were developed to guide effective protected area establishment. Protected area coverage has grown dramatically since the introduction of several high-profile biodiversity prioritization schemes, but the impact of such schemes on protected area establishment has not been evaluated. We used matching methods and a Before-After Control-Impact causal analysis to evaluate the impact of two key prioritization schemes—Biodiversity Hotspots and Last of the Wild—representing examples of the reactive and proactive ends of the prioritization spectrum. We found that Last of the Wild had a positive impact on the rate of protection in its identified priority areas, but Biodiversity Hotspots did not. Because Biodiversity Hotspots are in or near human-dominated landscapes, this scheme may have been unable to overcome biases towards protecting areas with little human pressure. In contrast, Last of the Wild aligned with the tendency to protect areas far from high human use and thus with lower implementation costs, and so received greater uptake. Stronger links between large-scale prioritizations and more locally driven implementation of area-based conservation, as well as other forms of conservation action, are needed to overcome practical constraints and effectively protect biodiversity on an increasingly human-dominated planet.

Understanding factors that determine a species' geographical range is crucial for predicting climate-induced range shifts. Two milkweed species, Asclepias syriaca and Asclepias speciosa, have overlapping ranges along a moisture gradient in North America and are primary food sources for endangered monarch caterpillars. With decreasing moisture, long-lived species often exhibit slower growth and greater drought tolerance, while many annual species exhibit faster growth strategies. Using this fast-slow framework, we assessed whether traits of these two sister species differ along a fast-slow growth continuum and could explain their distributions. We measured leaf and root functional traits in common gardens and greenhouse experiments. In key measures indicative of drought tolerance (e.g., growth, transpiration, and water potentials), the species were nearly identical. Contrary to expectations, A. speciosa did not exhibit greater drought tolerance, raising the question of how it survives in the more arid west. A reciprocal transplant study showed selection against A. syriaca in the western garden and that A. speciosa was better able to avoid seedling mortality. Focusing on seedling establishment, we found that A. speciosa exhibited faster deep-root development and a narrow leaf phenotype associated with slower wilting and delayed drought-induced mortality. Rather than differences on the fast-slow growth spectrum, our results indicate that A. speciosa avoids drought through faster deep-root growth and a slower wilting phenotype. Our study suggests that A. syriaca's range is limited by its drought tolerance, while A. speciosa employs a number of drought avoidance strategies to survive in more arid environments.

The Warsaw Framework for REDD+ (WFR) is an international framework for the cooperation between developed and developing countries to reduce forest-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, adopted by COP 19 in 2013 and anchored in article 5.2 of the Paris Agreement. In this article, the authors identify six reasons for why REDD+, as defined in the WFR, enjoys unfaltering importance to Parties' climate action. Within international law and governance, the WFR provides a unique structure for forest protection through international cooperation within a multilaterally agreed framework with clear rules, robust methodologies, independent oversight and safeguards for recognising the environmental and social values of forests beyond carbon sinks. Its uniqueness becomes obvious when contrasted against the international community's long-standing struggle to include forests in any other international legal outcome. The WFR has also built critical capacity of countries for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, in particular the reporting obligations under its Enhanced Transparency Framework. The experience gained under the WFR could be valuable for other sectors within the climate regime. However, the authors also argue that while REDD+ might be more relevant than ever on the course to global net-zero CO2 emissions, the full potential of REDD+ at scale, as defined in the WFR, has yet to be explored. As it is to be expected that forests will play a role in the context of carbon markets and other cooperative approaches under article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the paper also explores latest developments in this matter.

Despite a well-established system of community lands, the current lack of spatial data on community territories impacts how Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) in Europe are included in global discussions about land rights recognition and their critical role in land stewardship. We present an aggregation of spatial data for 42.5 Mha of recognized IPs and LCs lands in Western and Northern Europe, including data that were not previously included in global datasets. We show that governments recognize IPs and LCs lands through a diversity of tenure systems, which are managed under a variety of governance arrangements, including community, State, and shared governance. IPs and LCs contribute important services to people, underscoring their potential role in the climate and conservation needs of Europe.

Forest ecosystems absorb and store about 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually and are increasingly shaped by human land use and management. Climate change interacts with land use and forest dynamics to influence observed carbon stocks and the strength of the land carbon sink. We show that climate change effects on modeled forest land carbon stocks are strongest in tropical wildlands that have limited human influence. Global forest carbon stocks and carbon sink strength may decline as climate change and anthropogenic influences intensify, with wildland tropical forests, especially in Amazonia, likely being especially vulnerable.

Natural climate solutions (NCS) play a critical role in climate change mitigation. NCS can generate win–win co-benefits for biodiversity and human well-being, but they can also involve trade-offs (co-impacts). However, the massive evidence base on NCS co-benefits and possible trade-offs is poorly understood. We employ large language models to assess over 2 million published journal articles, primarily written in English, finding 257,266 relevant studies on NCS co-impacts. Using machine learning methods to extract data (for example, study location, species and other key variables), we create a global evidence map on NCS co-impacts. We find that global evidence on NCS co-impacts has grown approximately tenfold in three decades, and some of the most abundant evidence relates to NCS that have lower mitigation potential. Studies often examine multiple NCS, indicating some natural complementarities. Finally, we identify countries with high carbon mitigation potential but a relatively weak body of evidence on NCS co-impacts. Through effective methods and systematic and representative data on NCS co-impacts, we provide timely insights to inform NCS-related research and action globally.

Centering community values in conservation decision-making can mitigate harm to social-ecological systems caused by the climate, biodiversity, and social justice crises. However, it can be unclear how to weave these values into complicated processes, such as marine spatial planning (MSP), that have historically favoured western and biophysical knowledge and can perpetuate inequitable and status-quo power dynamics. Here, we contribute a community-led approach to create knowledge in support of MSP that works to center local and Indigenous values. Indigenous, academic, and non-profit partners co-created a mixed-methods participatory mapping approach to characterize place-based values within a fjord in the Salish Sea. We conducted 30 interviews and 300 surveys to map ocean-based values and characterize interactions across values (e.g., perceptions of conflicts and compatibilities). Communities strongly supported ecological values and identified places where spatial conservation and management opportunities could be explored with minimal perceived trade-offs. Results were shared with a community MSP decision-support tool to improve data accessibility and bridge the gap between knowledge and action. This mixed-methods approach can be replicated in other coastal communities to elevate the inclusion of social and cultural data in MSP and enhance harmonization of planning processes across governance scales (e.g., Indigenous, local, provincial, federal, transboundary). Overall, this case study contributes a local and Indigenous-partnered approach that centers community values and knowledge in early MSP stages so that both ocean and community health are meaningfully protected.

For the first time in the history of global biodiversity governance and global health governance, countries negotiated and adopted a Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP16) in 2024.1 The 6-year process to develop and agree to this Plan culminates decades of progress to advance the broad interconnections between biodiversity and health into international decision making.2–6 By adopting the Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health, parties acknowledged that biodiversity and health interlinkages encompass physical and mental health, communicable and non-communicable disease, health emergencies, social determinants, and food and water security. In the Plan, parties agreed to strengthen and enable health and environmental coordination across national ministries, disciplines, and sectors. The Plan contains 91 intersectoral health actions to incorporate into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) in alignment with the CBD Global Biodiversity Framework.

The rapid expansion of freely available Earth observation data, combined with advancements in forest monitoring capabilities, has led to the production of a variety of datasets on forest cover and change at the national and global scales. These datasets are essential for informing science and policy. Yet, this surge in available data products comes with the challenge of reconciling differences in the mapping of forest, non-forest, and forest loss across products. Differences in forest cover mapping between products result in divergent estimates of forest area change, potentially constraining the utility of these products to inform science and policy, consistently, across scales. We use the case of Colombia to demonstrate that these inconsistencies can be largely resolved by advancing operational forest monitoring capabilities toward the representation of forest cover and change as continuous rather than discrete variables. The analysis consisted of a comparison between the global forest change product (GFC) and the official national datasets on forest cover change for Colombia (IDEAM) in terms of overall and per-class classification agreement and estimates of forest-area loss. The comparison was performed after harmonizing the GFC dataset (HGFC) to maximize its overall classification agreement with the IDEAM map, based on the adoption of optimum percent tree cover thresholds, applied to GFC for subnational units. Based on these results, we evaluate whether classification agreement and disagreement between mapped forest and non-forest classes by HGFC and IDEAM can be explained by differences in continuous physical forest attributes, represented by forest Canopy Height (CH) and Above-Ground Biomass Density (AGBD). We produced the analysis for the entire country and also for mountainous and non-mountainous areas separately. We show that the optimal threshold in tree cover that maximizes map agreement, varies largely between subnational units, with values ranging between 20% and 100%. Results show a high overall agreement and also high agreement for stable forest and non-forest classes. Agreement between pixels classified as forest loss was much lower, regardless of the map used as reference. Classification agreement was lower for mountainous areas than for non-mountainous areas, particularly for forest loss and stable forest classes. Pixels representing classification disagreement were characterized by intermediate values of CH and AGBD that are significantly different from pixels classified as non-forest and forest for both maps, with significantly lower and higher CH and AGBD values, respectively. Differences were more notable in non-mountainous areas than in mountainous ones. We conclude that solving these large existing discrepancies in forest classification and forest loss estimates between datasets requires advancing operational capabilities toward the representation of forest cover and change as continuous rather than as categorical variables, with particular emphasis on mountainous areas. We illustrate how moving in such a direction can (1) promote consistency between forest cover definitions and map representation, (2) facilitate comparability among products and estimates of forest area loss at different scales of analysis, and (3) promote accountability in forest area loss assessments.