Mapping the planet's critical areas for biodiversity and nature's contributions to people

Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature's contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of the current levels of ten of nature's contributions to people and meet minimum representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species. This finding supports recent commitments by national governments under the Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve at least 30% of global lands and waters, and proposals to conserve half of the Earth. More than one-third of areas required for conserving nature's contributions to people and species are also highly suitable for agriculture, renewable energy, oil and gas, mining, or urban expansion. This indicates potential conflicts among conservation, climate and development goals.

Assessing the United Nations sustainable development goals from the inclusive wealth perspective

The statement of sustainability in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) framework needs to be supplemented by a formal proof that intergenerational well-being also improves. This is the first study that aims to provide empirical evidence that links the progress of the SDGs and the changes in well-being, which are proxied by the SDG Index and the Inclusive Wealth (IW) Index, respectively. We propose an SDGs-wealth model which was analyzed using a machine learning method involving a balanced panel of 147 countries for 2000-2019. We find a strong correlation between wealth and the SDGs, with Goals 12, 13, and 7 being the most significant predictors of wealth. In contrast to Goals 12 and 13, we find a positive correlation between Goal 7 and the per capita IW Index, suggesting that promoting affordable and clean energy is beneficial for wealth accumulation. Quite the opposite, fostering responsible consumption and production and climate actions might be detrimental to wealth. We also find an alarming result for 50 countries in our study since they have deviated from the sustainable development trajectories either in the short or long run. Our study suggests that to achieve sustainable development, instead of focusing on the complex interactions among the SDGs, policymakers should put a stronger focus on improving IW.

Mapping the planet's critical natural assets

Sustaining the organisms, ecosystems and processes that underpin human wellbeing is necessary to achieve sustainable development. Here we define critical natural assets as the natural and semi-natural ecosystems that provide 90% of the total current magnitude of 14 types of nature's contributions to people (NCP), and we map the global locations of these critical natural assets at 2 km resolution. Critical natural assets for maintaining local-scale NCP (12 of the 14 NCP) account for 30% of total global land area and 24% of national territorial waters, while 44% of land area is required to also maintain two global-scale NCP (carbon storage and moisture recycling). These areas overlap substantially with cultural diversity (areas containing 96% of global languages) and biodiversity (covering area requirements for 73% of birds and 66% of mammals). At least 87% of the world's population live in the areas benefitting from critical natural assets for local-scale NCP, while only 16% live on the lands containing these assets. Many of the NCP mapped here are left out of international agreements focused on conserving species or mitigating climate change, yet this analysis shows that explicitly prioritizing critical natural assets and the NCP they provide could simultaneously advance development, climate and conservation goals.