Philippa Kaur

Alpha diversity differences among communitiesNematode gut microbiomes were assigned into their respective species categories of E. antarcticus and P. murrayi based on 18S host data that was consistent with morphology (see Methods “Microinvertebrate haplotypes”). In contrast, due to recovery of three undiscernible 18S tardigrade haplotypes, the gut microbiomes were assigned to Tardigrada. Mat bacterial communities were significantly (Tukey’s HSD, P  0.65, χ2(1)  0.38, χ2(3)  More

As humans warm the planet, biodiversity is plummeting. These two global crises are connected in multiple ways. But the details of the intricate feedback loops between biodiversity decline and climate change are astonishingly under-studied.It is well known that climate extremes such as droughts and heatwaves can have devastating impacts on ecosystems and, in turn, that degraded ecosystems have a reduced capacity to protect humanity against the social and physical impacts of such events. Yet only a few such relationships have been probed in detail. Even less well known is whether biodiversity-depleted ecosystems will also have a negative effect on climate, provoking or exacerbating weather extremes.For us, a group of researchers living and working mainly in Central Europe, the wake-up call was the sequence of heatwaves of 2018, 2019 and 2022. It felt unreal to watch a floodplain forest suffer drought stress in Leipzig, Germany. Across Germany, more than 380,000 hectares of trees have now been damaged (see go.nature.com/3etrrnp; in German), and the forestry sector is struggling with how to plan restoration activities over the coming decades1. What could have protected these ecosystems against such extremes? And how will the resultant damage further impact our climate?
Nature-based solutions can help cool the planet — if we act now
In June 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published their first joint report2, acknowledging the need for more collaborative work between these two domains. And some good policy moves are afoot: the new EU Forest Strategy for 2030, released in July 2021, and other high-level policy initiatives by the European Commission, formally recognize the multifunctional value of forests, including their role in regulating atmospheric processes and climate. But much more remains to be done.To thoroughly quantify the risk that lies ahead, ecologists, climate scientists, remote-sensing experts, modellers and data scientists need to work together. The upcoming meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada, in December is a good opportunity to catalyse such collaboration.Buffers and responsesWhen lamenting the decline in biodiversity, most people think first about the tragedy of species driven to extinction. There are more subtle changes under way, too.For instance, a study across Germany showed that over the past century, most plant species have declined in cover, with only a few increasing in abundance3. Also affected is species functionality4 — genetic diversity, and the diversity of form and structure that can make communities more or less efficient at taking up nutrients, resisting heat or surviving pathogen attacks.When entire ecosystems are transformed, their functionality is often degraded. They are left with less capacity to absorb pollution, store carbon dioxide, soak up water, regulate temperature and support vital functions for other organisms, including humans5. Conversely, higher levels of functional biodiversity increase the odds of an ecosystem coping with unexpected events, including climate extremes. This is known as the insurance effect6.The effect is well documented in field experiments and modelling studies. And there is mounting evidence of it in ecosystem responses to natural events. A global synthesis of various drought conditions showed, for instance, that forests were more resilient when trees with a greater diversity of strategies for using and transporting water lived together7.

Dead trees near Iserlohn, Germany, in April 2020 (left) and after felling in June 2021 (right).Credit: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty

However, biodiversity cannot protect all ecosystems against all kinds of impacts. In a study this year across plots in the United States and Canada, for example, mortality was shown to be higher in diverse forest ecosystems8. The proposed explanation for this unexpected result was that greater biodiversity could also foster more competition for resources. When extreme events induce stress, resources can become scarce in areas with high biomass and competition can suddenly drive mortality, overwhelming the benefits of cohabitation. Whether or not higher biodiversity protects an ecosystem from an extreme is highly site-specific.Some plants respond to drought by reducing photosynthesis and transpiration immediately; others can maintain business as usual for much longer, stabilizing the response of the ecosystem as a whole. So the exact response of ecosystems to extremes depends on interactions between the type of event, plant strategies, vegetation composition and structure.Which plant strategies will prevail is hard to predict and highly dependent on the duration and severity of the climatic extreme, and on previous extremes9. Researchers cannot fully explain why some forests, tree species or individual plants survive in certain regions hit by extreme climate conditions, whereas entire stands disappear elsewhere10. One study of beech trees in Germany showed that survival chances had a genomic basis11, yet it is not clear whether the genetic variability present in forests will be sufficient to cope with future conditions.And it can take years for ecosystem impacts to play out. The effects of the two consecutive hot drought years, 2018 and 2019, were an eye-opener for many of us. In Leipzig, tree growth declined, pathogens proliferated and ash and maple trees died. The double blow, interrupted by a mild winter, on top of the long-term loss of soil moisture, led to trees dying at 4–20 times the usual rate throughout Germany, depending on the species (see go.nature.com/3etrrnp; in German). The devastation peaked in 2020.Ecosystem changes can also affect atmospheric conditions and climate. Notably, land-use change can alter the brightness (albedo) of the planet’s surface and its capacity for heat exchange. But there are more-complex mechanisms of influence.Vegetation can be a source or sink for atmospheric substances. A study published in 2020 showed that vegetation under stress is less capable of removing ozone than are unstressed plants, leading to higher levels of air pollution12. Pollen and other biogenic particles emitted from certain plants can induce the freezing of supercooled cloud droplets, allowing ice in clouds to form at much warmer temperatures13, with consequences for rainfall14. Changes to species composition and stress can alter the dynamics of these particle emissions. Plant stress also modifies the emission of biogenic volatile organic gases, which can form secondary particles. Wildfires — enhanced by drought and monocultures — affect clouds, weather and climate through the emission of greenhouse gases and smoke particles. Satellite data show that afforestation can boost the formation of low-level, cooling cloud cover15 by enhancing the supply of water to the atmosphere.Research prioritiesAn important question is whether there is a feedback loop: will more intense, and more frequent, extremes accelerate the degradation and homogenization of ecosystems, which then, in turn, promote further climate extremes? So far, we don’t know.One reason for this lack of knowledge is that research has so far been selective: most studies have focused on the impacts of droughts and heatwaves on ecosystems. Relatively little is known about the impacts of other kinds of extremes, such as a ‘false spring’ caused by an early-season bout of warm weather, a late spring frost, heavy rainfall events, ozone maxima, or exposure to high levels of solar radiation during dry, cloudless weather.Researchers have no overview, much less a global catalogue, of how each dimension of biodiversity interacts with the full breadth of climate extremes in different combinations and at multiple scales. In an ideal world, scientists would know, for example, how the variation in canopy density, vegetation age, and species diversity protects against storm damage; and whether and how the diversity of canopy structures controls atmospheric processes such as cloud formation in the wake of extremes. Researchers need to link spatiotemporal patterns of biodiversity with the responses of ecosystem processes to climate extremes.
Biodiversity needs every tool in the box: use OECMs
Creating such a catalogue is a huge challenge, particularly given the more frequent occurrence of extremes with little or no precedent16. Scientists will also need to account for the increasing likelihood of pile-ups of climate stressors. The ways in which ecosystems respond to compound events17 could be quite different. Researchers will have to study which facets of biodiversity (genetic, physiological, structural) are required to stabilize ecosystems and their functions against these onslaughts.There is at least one piece of good news: tools for data collection and analysis are improving fast, with huge advances over the past decade in satellite-based observations for both climate and biodiversity monitoring. The European Copernicus Earth-observation programme, for example — which includes the Sentinel 1 and 2 satellite fleet, and other recently launched missions that cover the most important wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum — offer metre-scale resolution observations of the biochemical status of plants and canopy structure. Atmospheric states are recorded in unprecedented detail, vertically and in time.Scientists must now make these data interoperable and integrate them with in situ observations. The latter is challenging. On the ground, a new generation of data are being collected by researchers and by citizen scientists18. For example, unique insights into plant responses to stress are coming from time-lapse photography of leaf orientation; accelerometer measures of movement patterns of stems have been shown to provide proxies for the drought stress of trees19.High-quality models are needed to turn these data into predictions. The development of functional ‘digital twins’ of the climate system is now in reach. These models replicate hydrometeorological processes at the metre scale, and are fast enough to allow for rapid scenario development and testing20. The analogous models for ecosystems are still in a more conceptual phase. Artificial-intelligence methods will be key here, to study links between climate extremes and biodiversity.Researchers can no longer afford to track global transformations of the Earth system in disciplinary silos. Instead, ecologists and climate scientists need to establish a joint agenda, so that humanity is properly forewarned: of the risks of removing biodiversity buffers against climate extremes, and of the risk of thereby amplifying these extremes. More

I was filled with hope when I read the first draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in mid-2021. It seemed that the parties to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity had learnt from bitter experience — the failure of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, set for the previous decade. Instead of vague aims, the draft framework incorporated most of the advice that the scientific community, myself included, had marshalled. It contained ambitious quantitative thresholds, such as those for the area of ecosystem to be protected, the percentage of genetic diversity to be maintained, and percentage reductions for overall extinction rates, pesticide use and subsidies harmful to biodiversity.Then came the square brackets. In the world of policy, these mark proposed amendments that the parties do not yet agree on. The square brackets proliferated at an alarming rate throughout the GBF text, enclosing, neutralizing and paralysing goals and targets. By July 2021, in a version about 10,200 words long, there were more than 900 pairs of square brackets.Brackets germinated with particular vigour in sections that could make the greatest difference for a better future because of their precision, ambition or conceptual novelty. Almost all quantitative thresholds had been bracketed or had disappeared.
The United Nations must get its new biodiversity targets right
I applaud the new prominence given to gender justice (with a new dedicated Target 22) and to financial resources and capacity building (Target 19). I wonder why other key aspects have not received the same treatment, and have instead been compressed almost beyond recognition. For example, the first draft highlighted that species, ecosystems, genetic diversity and nature’s contribution to people each needed their own specific, verifiable outcomes. Now they have coagulated into one vague yet verbose paragraph.This thicket of square brackets smothers the GBF and the hopes of those of us who see transformative change as the only way forward for life on Earth as we know it.In a titanic effort, a streamlined proposal from the Informal Group on the GBF has halved the brackets to be considered by the parties when they meet in Montreal, Canada, for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) on 7–19 December.We need a text with teeth — and far fewer brackets. This much we have learnt in the 30 years since the foundational 1992 Rio Summit drew attention to the impact of human activities on the environment: a strong, precise, ambitious text does not in itself ensure successful implementation, but a weak, vague, toothless text almost guarantees failure.It was no surprise when the Convention on Biological Diversity officially declared the failure of its ten-year Aichi Targets. People involved at the international interface of biodiversity science and policy were already discussing how to do better in the next decade with the GBF.
Crucial biodiversity summit will go ahead in Canada, not China: what scientists think
The scientific community rose to the occasion. In just three years, we produced the first-ever intergovernmental appraisal of life on Earth and what it means to people: The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services from IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), which I co-chaired. It was ready in time for the original 2020 date for COP15, before the global disruption caused by COVID-19. It was the most comprehensive ever synthesis of published information on the topic, an inclusive conceptual framework involving various disciplines and knowledge systems, and unprecedented participation of Indigenous peoples.Then, in 2020, we assembled an interdisciplinary team of more than 60 biodiversity scientists across the world, and within a few months produced detailed suggestions for the goals of the GBF. Since then, we have made the best of the many pandemic postponements by issuing a stream of specific, evidence-based recommendations on targets, scenarios and implementation.The scientific advice is convergent. First, the GBF needs to explicitly address each facet of biodiversity; none is a good substitute or umbrella for the others. Second, the biodiversity goals must be more ambitious than ever, accompanied by equally ambitious targets for concrete action and sufficient resources to make them happen. Third, the targets need to be precise, traceable and coordinated.Fourth, formally protecting a proportion of the planet’s most pristine ecosystems will by itself fall far short. Nature must be mainstreamed, incorporated in decisions made for the landscapes in which we live and work every day, well beyond protected areas. Finally, and most crucially, targets must focus on the root causes of biodiversity loss: the ways in which we consume, trade and allocate subsidies, incentives and safeguards.From previous experience, I expected objections to certain sections— pesticides and subsidies, say — but they are everywhere. Only 2 of the 22 targets have no brackets. Ironing out objections takes precious time. Because the framework can be enshrined only by consensus, too many objections can lead to too much compromise.Now, to avert failure, we exhort the governments gathering in Montreal to be brave, long-sighted and open-hearted, and to produce a visionary, ambitious biodiversity framework, grounded in knowledge. The awareness and mobilization of their constituencies has never been greater, the evidence in their hands never clearer. If not now, when?

Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

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Extent and location of critical natural assetsCritical natural assets providing the 12 local NCP (Fig. 1a) occupy only 30% (41 million km2) of total land area (excluding Antarctica) and 24% (34 million km2) of marine Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), reflecting the steep slope of the aggregate NCP accumulation curve (Fig. 1b). Despite this modest proportion of global land area, the shares of countries’ land areas that are designated as critical can vary substantially. The 20 largest countries require only 24% of their land area, on average, to maintain 90% of current levels of NCP, while smaller countries (10,000 to 1.5 million km2) require on average 40% of their land area (Supplementary Data 1). This high variability in the NCP–area relationship is primarily driven by the proportion of countries’ land areas made up by natural assets (that is, excluding barren, ice and snow, and developed lands), but even when this is accounted for, there are outliers (Extended Data Fig. 2). Outliers may be due to spatial patterns in human population density (for example, countries with dense population centres and vast expanses with few people, such as Canada and Russia, require far less area to achieve NCP targets) or large ecosystem heterogeneity (if greater ecosystem diversity yields higher levels of diverse NCP in a smaller proportion of area, which may explain patterns in Chile and Australia).The highest-value critical natural assets (the locations delivering the highest magnitudes of NCP in the smallest area, denoted by the darkest blue or green shades in Fig. 1c) often coincide with diverse, relatively intact natural areas near or upstream from large numbers of people. Many of these high-value areas coincide with areas of greatest spatial congruence among multiple NCP (Extended Data Fig. 3). Spatially correlated pairs of local NCP (Supplementary Table 4) include those related to water (flood risk reduction with nitrogen retention and nitrogen with sediment retention); forest products (timber and fuelwood); and those occurring closer to human-modified habitats (pollination with nature access and with nitrogen retention). Coastal risk reduction, forage production for grazing, and riverine fish harvest are the most spatially distinct from other local NCP. In the marine realm, there is substantial overlap of fisheries with coastal risk reduction and reef tourism (though not between the latter two, which each have much smaller critical areas than exist for fisheries).Number of people benefitting from critical natural assetsWe estimate that ~87% of the world’s current population, 6.4 billion people, benefit directly from at least one of the 12 local NCP provided by critical natural assets, while only 16% live on the lands providing these benefits (and they may also benefit; Fig. 2a). To quantify the number of beneficiaries of critical natural assets, we spatially delineate their benefitting areas (which varies on the basis of NCP: for example, areas downstream, within the floodplain, in low-lying areas near the coast, or accessible by a short travel). While our optimization selects for the provision of 90% of the current value of each NCP, it is not guaranteed that 90% of the world’s population would benefit (since it does not include considerations for redundancy in adjacent pixels and therefore many of the areas selected benefit the same populations), so it is notable that an estimated 87% do. This estimate of ‘local’ beneficiaries probably underestimates the total number of people benefitting because it includes only NCP for which beneficiaries can be spatially delineated to avoid double-counting, yet it is striking that the vast majority, 6.1 billion people, live within 1 h travel (by road, rail, boat or foot, taking the fastest path17) of critical natural assets, and more than half of the world’s population lives downstream of these areas (Fig. 2b). Material NCP are often delivered locally, but many also enter global supply chains, making it difficult to delineate beneficiaries spatially for these NCP. However, past studies have calculated that globally more than 54 million people benefit directly from the timber industry18, 157 million from riverine fisheries19, 565 million from marine fisheries20 and 1.3 billion from livestock grazing21, and across the tropics alone 2.7 billion are estimated to be dependent on nature for one or more basic needs22.Fig. 2: People benefitting from and living on critical natural assets (CNA).a,b, ‘Local’ beneficiaries were calculated through the intersection of areas benefitting from different NCP, to avoid double-counting people in areas of overlap; only those NCP for which beneficiaries could be spatially delineated were included (that is, not material NCP that enter global supply chains: fisheries, timber, livestock or crop pollination). Bars show percentages of total population globally and for large and small countries (a) or the percentage of relevant population globally (b). Numbers inset in bars show millions of people making up that percentage. Numbers to the right of bars in b show total relevant population (in millions of people, equivalent to total global population from Landscan 2017 for population within 1 h travel or downstream, but limited to the total population living within 10 km of floodplains or along coastlines 80%) of their populations benefitting from critical natural assets, but small countries have much larger proportions of their populations living within the footprint of critical natural assets than do large countries (Fig. 2a and Supplementary Data 2). When people live in these areas, and especially when current levels of use of natural assets are not sustainable, regulations or incentives may be needed to maintain the benefits these assets provide. While protected areas are an important conservation strategy, they represent only 15% of the critical natural assets for local NCP (Supplementary Table 5); additional areas should not necessarily be protected using designations that restrict human access and use, or they could cease to provide some of the diverse values that make them so critical23. Other area-based conservation measures, such as those based on Indigenous and local communities’ governance systems, Payments for Ecosystem Services programmes, and sustainable use of land- and seascapes, can all contribute to maintaining critical flows of NCP in natural and semi-natural ecosystems24.Overlaps between local and global prioritiesUnlike the 12 local NCP prioritized here at the national scale, certain benefits of natural assets accrue continentally or even globally. We therefore optimize two additional NCP at a global scale: vulnerable terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage (that is, the amount of total ecosystem carbon lost in a typical disturbance event25, hereafter ‘ecosystem carbon’) and vegetation-regulated atmospheric moisture recycling (the supply of atmospheric moisture and precipitation sustained by plant life26, hereafter ‘moisture recycling’). Over 80% of the natural asset locations identified as critical for the 12 local NCP are also critical for the two global NCP (Fig. 3). The spatial overlap between critical natural assets for local and global NCP accounts for 24% of land area, with an additional 14% of land area critical for global NCP that is not considered critical for local NCP (Extended Data Fig. 4). Together, critical natural assets for securing both local and global NCP require 44% of total global land area. When each NCP is optimized individually (carbon and moisture NCP at the global scale; the other 12 at the country scale), the overlap between carbon or moisture NCP and the other NCP exceeds 50% for all terrestrial (and freshwater) NCP except coastal risk reduction (which overlaps only 36% with ecosystem carbon, 5% with moisture recycling; Supplementary Table 4).Fig. 3: Spatial overlaps between critical natural assets for local and global NCP.Red and teal denote where critical natural assets for global NCP (providing 90% of ecosystem carbon and moisture recycling globally) or for local NCP (providing 90% of the 12 NCP listed in Fig. 1), respectively, but not both, occur; gold shows areas where the two overlap (24% of the total area). Together, local and global critical natural assets account for 44% of total global land area (excluding Antarctica). Grey areas show natural assets not defined as ‘critical’ by this analysis, though still providing some values to certain populations. White areas were excluded from the optimization.Full size imageSynergies can also be found between NCP and biodiversity and cultural diversity. Critical natural assets for local NCP at national levels overlap with part or all of the area of habitat (AOH, mapped on the basis of species range maps, habitat preferences and elevation27) for 60% of 28,177 terrestrial vertebrates (Supplementary Data 3). Birds (73%) and mammals (66%) are better represented than reptiles and amphibians (44%). However, these critical natural assets represent only 34% of the area for endemic vertebrate species (with 100% of their AOH located within a given country; Supplementary Data 3) and 16% of the area for all vertebrates if using a more conservative representation target framework based on the IUCN Red List criteria (though, notably, achieving Red List representation targets is impossible for 24% of species without restoration or other expansion of existing AOH; Supplementary Data 4). Cultural diversity (proxied by linguistic diversity) has far higher overlaps with critical natural assets than does biodiversity; these areas intersect 96% of global Indigenous and non-migrant languages28 (Supplementary Data 5). The degree to which languages are represented in association with critical natural assets is consistent across most countries, even at the high end of language diversity (countries containing >100 Indigenous and non-migrant languages, such as Indonesia, Nigeria and India). This high correspondence provides further support for the importance of safeguarding rights to access critical natural assets, especially for Indigenous cultures that benefit from and help maintain them. Despite the larger land area required for maintaining the global NCP compared with local NCP, global NCP priority areas overlap with slightly fewer languages (92%) and with only 2% more species (60% of species AOH), although a substantially greater overlap is seen with global NCP if Red List criteria are considered (36% compared with 16% for local NCP; Supplementary Data 4). These results provide different insights than previous efforts at smaller scales, particularly a similar exercise in Europe that found less overlap with priority areas for biodiversity and NCP29. However, the 40% of all vertebrate species whose habitats did not overlap with critical natural assets could drive very different patterns if biodiversity were included in the optimization.Although these 14 NCP are not comprehensive of the myriad ways that nature benefits and is valued by people23, they capture, spatially and thematically, many elements explicitly mentioned in the First Draft of the CBD’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework13: food security, water security, protection from hazards and extreme events, livelihoods and access to green and blue spaces. Our emphasis here is to highlight the contributions of natural and semi-natural ecosystems to human wellbeing, specifically contributions that are often overlooked in mainstream conservation and development policies around the world. For example, considerations for global food security often include only crop production rather than nature’s contributions to it via pollination or vegetation-mediated precipitation, or livestock production without partitioning out the contribution of grasslands from more intensified feed production.Gaps and next stepsOur synthesis of these 14 NCP represents a substantial advance beyond other global prioritizations that include NCP limited to ecosystem carbon stocks, fresh water and marine fisheries30,31,32, though still falls short of including all important contributions of nature such as its relational values33. Despite the omission of many NCP that were not able to be mapped, further analyses indicate that results are fairly robust to inclusion of additional NCP. Dropping one of the 12 local NCP at a time results in More

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