Although more than half the world’s countries have committed to protecting at least 30% of land and oceans by 2030 in support of biodiversity, various questions emerge: Where and what type of land should be protected?
Although more than half the world’s countries have committed to protecting at least 30% of land and oceans by 2030 in support of biodiversity, various questions emerge: Where and what type of land should be protected? How will new land protections impact carbon emissions and climate change, or the land needed for energy and food production? As a result, many decision makers are left questioning how to take action around protecting new land as they set their sights on achieving ambitious targets to preserve biodiversity in regions around the globe. New science tools can shed light on some of those questions.
A recent study led by climate scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to inform the discussion around how protecting additional land to meet conservation goals may impact land use (such as agricultural) and land cover (such as grass, water, or vegetation). The research is among the first to explore how potential pathways to achieve these bold targets affect agricultural expansion, and its findings suggest that meeting the 30% protection targets could lead to substantial regional shifts in land use and in some cases still fail to protect the world’s most biodiverse hotspots.
“It is important that we protect land if we want to stem additional ecosystem degradation,” said the paper’s lead author Alan Di Vittorio, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area. “But protecting land entails tradeoffs with other land uses and could have negative impacts on the agricultural sector, such as less land for bioenergy crops or less forest land for timber.”
Read more at: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Amount of currently protected forest, shrubland, and grassland land as the percent of total forest, shrubland, and grassland. a) Protected land that is suitable for agriculture. b) Protected land that is unsuitable for agriculture. (Photo Credit: Alan Di Vittorio, Berkeley Lab)
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/09/doubling-protected-lands-for-biodiversity-tradeoffs/
