TL;DR

• Biodiversity and climate are linked. We can’t save one without saving the other.
• The actions needed to conserve and restore biodiversity can deliver 1/3 of the mitigation needed to keep global warming below 2°C.
• There are multiple paths that give economic value to biodiversity itself, making it more profitable to conserve rather than destroy nature.

• TL;DR
• What is biodiversity?
• Biodiversity loss
• Causes of biodiversity loss
• Measuring biodiversity
• The value of biodiversity
• Biodiversity and climate
• The voluntary credit market
• Addressing biodiversity loss
• The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
• The Nagoya Protocol
• EU Efforts
• Biodiversity strategy for 2030
• The EU Taxonomy
• The Nature Positive Movement
• Corporate action
• Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)
• Resources

What is biodiversity?

Biodiversity = the variety of all life on earth; this means everything from plants and animals to microscopic organisms living within the soil. Our planet supports the life of around 8.7 million different species, and all of these organisms work together and interact to maintain and support the ecosystem they belong to, which helps keep our planet and climate stable.

Unfortunately, all of the world’s ecosystems are at risk, as the economic growth of recent decades has come at the expense of our natural world, but his destructive path is not one we can afford to continue down. The truth is that half of the world’s GDP is dependent on nature, and the longer we wait to restore it, the more costly those restorations are likely to be.

Biodiversity loss

Since humans have walked the earth, we have altered 75-95% of terrestrial land, transforming it from wild nature to settlements, croplands, and rangelands. We have also dammed or diverted 63% of the world’s largest rivers, are overfishing 34% of our global fish stocks, and have contributed to the reshaping of nearly all marine coastal landscapes.

Between 1970 to 2016, 68% of all monitored wildlife populations (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) were lost, and since 1990, about 420 million hectares of forests have been converted to other land uses.

Causes of biodiversity loss

This list is intended to provide a snapshot of some of the major causes of biodiversity loss and should not be considered exhaustive.

• Habitat destruction and fragmentation through land/sea use change
• Roads and transportation infrastructure.
• Land conversion (i.e., turning a forest into farmland).
• Improper reforestation/afforestation.
• Climate change
• Extreme weather events like floods, fire, and drought will become more devastating and occur with greater frequency.
• Increasing temperatures and changing water availability will make areas uninhabitable to some species, and without new areas to relocate into, those species will become locally extinct.
• Climate change is causing our oceans to warm, lose oxygen, and become more acidic, with disastrous implications for healthy ocean ecosystems.
• Resource exploitation
• Unsustainable fishing, harvesting, hunting, etc.
• Illegal logging and poaching.
• Invasive species
• Unintentional - “stowaways” brought in via tourism or trade.
• Intentional - pet trade, food production, the timber industry, and horticulture.
• Forced - climate change or habitat destruction forces species into new areas.
• Pollution

We recently crossed the planetary boundary for novel entities (or materials not found in nature) being introduced into the environment. Chemical pollution, in particular, is heavily toxic to living organisms. These substances range far beyond pesticides and fertilizers to lesser-known pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, industrial additives, and more.

Measuring biodiversity

Biodiversity has been historically challenging and costly to measure, requiring extensive manual labor, expertise, and financing to complete. Fortunately, technological advancements are reducing the cost and complexity of measuring and monitoring changes in biodiversity.

These advancements include:

• Acoustics: Many animals (especially birds, bats, and insects) have highly specific sounds that can be used to identify their presence in an area.
• DNA: The DNA of organisms within an ecosystem can be found in soil, water, and even floating in the air.
• Remote sensing: Satellites and drones offer increasingly detailed looks at areas (often inaccessible to humans) at a larger scale and faster pace than previously possible.
• Machine learning: With great data comes great responsibility. Machine learning allows for rapid and unbiased data processing at a larger scale and lower cost.

The value of biodiversity

More than half of all global GDP depends on nature, and UNEP estimates that every $1 invested in ecosystem restoration creates up to $30 in economic benefits.

Biodiversity and climate

“So long as we continue to lose biodiversity, we lose the natural capital that the planetary systems depend on for climate regulation. So the two crises are locked in a self-reinforcing spiral together.” - Dr. Zoe Balmforth, Ecologist and Co-Founder of Pivotal.

It is now clear that biodiversity and climate are linked and that we can’t save one without the other. Actions to prevent and reverse ecosystem degradation have the potential to deliver about one-third of the mitigation necessary to keep global warming below 2°C. On the flip side, biodiversity is sensitive to the effects of climate change, so we must limit warming to safeguard it.

The voluntary credit market

There are multiple ways to give economic value to biodiversity on the voluntary market. The first use is as a biodiversity offset in itself to compensate for harming nature, but biodiversity is also one path to ensure the high quality and price of carbon offsets.

• Biodiversity credits: Purchased as compensation for biodiversity loss due to economic activities, to manage risk, or as an investment in conservation and recovery efforts.
• Quality carbon credits: Carbon credits with co-benefits often sell at a premium price.
• The downside being that there is often little to no evidence of the biodiversity outcomes associated with those credits.
• Environmental credit stacking: Allows providers of credits to receive multiple payments (i.e., receiving one payment for carbon and one payment for biodiversity) for a single practice by demonstrating evidence of multiple outcomes. These payments are scalable along with the size of the environmental benefits.

Advancements in the measurement of biodiversity are poised to ensure the quality and integrity of conservation and restoration projects by ensuring that credits are awarded based on evidence of outcomes rather than statements of planned activities.

Addressing biodiversity loss

Preventing further biodiversity loss is not out of reach but will require immediate and drastic action. It may even be possible to reverse some of the observed trends if overproduction and overconsumption are sufficiently curbed.

The area in most drastic need of change is food production, which is responsible for 80% of global deforestation and the loss of millions of acres of other habitats. In 2019, North America alone saw 2.6 million acres of grasslands converted into agriculture (500,000 more than the previous year). The farmland we have is becoming massively degraded due to intensive agriculture practices, leading to even more habitat destruction in the name of food production for an ever-climbing population.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

Three objectives (since its founding in 1993):

1. The conservation of biological diversity
2. The sustainable use of the components of biological diversity
3. The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources

In 2011, the CBD set the Aichi Biodiversity Targets in an effort to conserve natural systems by 2020. None of them were met.

The Nagoya Protocol

Signed in 2010 and put into force in 2014, The Nagoya Protocol set out to create a legally binding framework around transparent access and benefit sharing between countries with resources and countries wanting to use those resources. The idea is that countries with resources will have incentives to preserve and restore their valuable genetic material because the more they have to provide, the more they stand to gain in return. The results of this transactional conservation strategy remain to be seen.

EU Efforts

Biodiversity strategy for 2030

*Adopting a proposal is the first step in the EU legislative procedure. The proposal must now go through two reading processes with the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before being adopted.

The EU Taxonomy

The EU Taxonomy is intended to act as a classification system for green economic activities, prevent greenwashing, and shift investments towards more sustainable activities. In order to be Taxonomy aligned, the economic activity must make a substantial contribution to at least one of the six objectives while doing no significant harm to the others.

One of the six objectives established by the Taxonomy is “the protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems,” meaning that an activity must not harm biodiversity to be eligible for taxonomy alignment.

The Nature Positive Movement

Over 300 organizations have signed the Nature Positive Movement that calls for governments to commit to being nature-positive by 2030.

Corporate action

Climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening supply chains, and so there is a growing trend of corporations prioritizing biodiversity—or at least disclosing their impacts on nature. With increasing public awareness about the importance of biodiversity, retaining consumers and staff puts additional pressure for responsible action.

Some examples:

• Textile Exchange: Has completed the first baseline report for biodiversity impacts from 157 companies in the fashion and textile industry. The aim is to “mobilize the industry towards becoming nature positive by 2030.” According to the report, 59% of companies have made commitments to address biodiversity, and 8% have strategies already in place.
• Unilever: Has created a €1bn Climate and Nature Fund to enable its brands to take action on nature preservation and conservation. Unilever has committed to “protect and regenerate 1.5 million hectares of land, forests, and oceans by 2030.”
• Nestlé: Set a goal in 2010 to become deforestation-free in its product lines by 2020, but has since switched to a “Forest Positive” strategy that incorporates conservation and restoration.

Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)

The TNFD was established in 2021 to create a “market-led” framework for reporting and acting on nature-related risks and opportunities. There are four planned prototypes (on v0.2 as of June 2022) before the final recommendation in September 2023. Each version will be piloted and reviewed by stakeholders (financial institutions, academics, industry, civil society, etc), with feedback being used to refine each iteration.

TNFD is being developed as a voluntary tool, but according to its website, the initiative is “receiving strong interest from policymakers and regulators from a number of jurisdictions” (in regards to becoming a mandatory disclosure).

Resources

• Nature restoration law (European Commission)
• Rewilding and the climate emergency (Rewilding Britain)
• Agriculture and climate change are reshaping insect biodiversity worldwide (Outhwaite et al., 2022)
• Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation (Tuia et al., 2022)
• Anthropogenic Chemicals As Underestimated Drivers of Biodiversity Loss: Scientific and Societal Implications (Groh et al., 2022)
• Biodiversity: The next frontier for tokenized markets (Toucan Blog, Apr 2022)
• UN land report: Five key takeaways for climate change, food systems and nature loss (CarbonBrief, Apr 2022)
• Nature loss threatens financial stability and central banks should act: new report (Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Mar 2022)
• Beyond GDP: making nature count in the shift to sustainability (UNEP, Feb 2022)
• Looming extinctions due to invasive species: Irreversible loss of ecological strategy and evolutionary history (Bellard et al., 2021)
• Biodiversity and financial stability: building the case for action (Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Oct 2021)
• Becoming #GenerationRestoration: Ecosystem Restoration for People, Nature and Climate (UNEP, Jun 2021)
• Backing biodiversity to save ourselves (Financial Times, Sep 2021)
• Report: Millions of Acres of Grassland Lost to Agriculture This Year (Modern Farmer, Sep 2021)
• All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic (Visual Capitalist, Aug 2021)
• Is the Nagoya Protocol designed to conserve biodiversity? (Sirakaya, 2021)
• People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years (Ellis et al., 2021)
• Drivers of future alien species impacts: An expert-based assessment (Essi et al., 2020)
• Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy (Leclere et al., 2020)
• Soil Microbiomes Under Climate Change and Implications for Carbon Cycling (Naylor et al., 2020)
• With the right action, reversing biodiversity loss still remains possible (Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sep 2020)
• The world has missed key biodiversity goals – but these 8 changes could make all the difference (World Economic Forum, Sep 2020)
• Increase in invasive species poses dramatic threat to biodiversity – report (The Guardian, Jul 2020)
• How much of a market is involved in a biodiversity offset? A typology of biodiversity offset policies (Koh et al., 2019)
• Terrestrial Passive Acoustic Monitoring: Review and Perspectives (Sugai et al., 2019)
• Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019)
• UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ (UNEP, May 2019)
• Environmental Co-benefits and Stacking in Environmental Markets (Lankoski et al., 2015)

Last updated: Aug 2022