The Biodiversity Integrity Index can be used to show how biodiversity in any one area changes over time. The maps show changes in biodiversity between 2000 and 2020, with warmer colors indicating places with increased biodiversity and cooler colors indicating places with reduced biodiversity. **Trustee of the Natural History Museum, London.
Many countries around the world have agreed to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030.
However, there are conflicting ideas about which areas should be protected. Scientists at the Natural History Museum are using global biodiversity data to try to better understand which regions will contribute greatly to the health of our planet.
The planet is facing a two-sided emergency.
On the one hand, there is the ongoing climate crisis, in which the constant release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has begun to increase the frequency and severity of floods, wildfires, and droughts.
To curb this, most countries have signed the Paris Agreement. It is an international treaty on climate change that aims to limit the increase in global average temperature to "well below" 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Progress in this area has been slow. Countries come together every year to assess progress, with the most recent meeting taking place during COP28 in Dubai.
But another emerging issue is the biodiversity crisis. It's a dramatic and devastating decline of the natural world that is being replicated globally, with species, habitats, and ecosystems being lost at an unprecedented rate.
Driven by land-use change, overexploitation and urbanization, the biodiversity crisis has historically been overlooked, but is now receiving the attention of ** and policymakers. If the planet loses too much biodiversity, the future health and survival of millions of people around the world will be at risk.
For example, the destruction of coastal mangrove forests not only causes losses to the wildlife that lives in them, but also increases the risk of severe flood events for people living in the same area.
One proposed solution to the biodiversity crisis is an initiative called "30 by 30" (also known as 30x30).
The idea is that in order to keep biodiversity at healthy levels, 30% of land and sea should be designated as protected areas by 2030. To date, more than 100 countries have signed up to the initiative, which has now been adopted as a formal objective of the international treaty of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
**Trustee of the Natural History Museum, London.
However, the initiative has not yet been universally accepted. There are concerns that the 30 per cent to be protected, if not sensitively identified and enforced, could lead to the forced displacement of indigenous peoples in the name of protecting the world's wildlife**.
Professor Andy Purvis, principal investigator at the Museum of Natural History, has pioneered the use of data to model how biodiversity responds to human pressures.
Every country has places that are important for providing ecosystem services and species conservation, but these places are not necessarily in the same place," Andy explained. "Protected areas are often located in uninhabited places, but the sites most important for ecosystem services are often shared by humans and nature.
So if 30x30 is only focused on preventing species extinction in remote areas, it could be a disaster for the ecosystem services that people depend on. We have to make sure that the places where people live see nature and protect 30% of them.
What is needed now is more targeted information and data to get a clearer picture of which lands should be considered under the 30 30 plan.
To better protect the planet's biodiversity, policymakers first need to know where the natural environment is doing well and where it is most affected. This can then tell which areas should be covered by 30x30.
To try to answer these critical questions, Andy and his team developed a tool called the Biodiversity Integrity Index. Essentially, it's a measure of the health of nature in any place in any year since 2000.
Using extensive data from thousands of scientific studies that study how species (including mammals, birds, insects, and plants) perform worldwide, the team can infer biodiversity baselines across different regions. This creates an estimated percentage of the original species number and its abundance, which remain in any given area.
Researchers can then compare how nature is managed, year after year. This gives us a clearer picture of where nature is doing well and increasing, and where it is not doing well and decreasing.
As always, there are a few caveats to this approach. For example, in places where much of biodiversity was destroyed before the 20th century, such as Western Europe, data often show that the state of nature has barely changed, simply because it started from an already low baseline. In addition, smaller countries often show a sharp decline in biodiversity because they have fewer places for flora and fauna.
**Trustee of the Natural History Museum, London.
By focusing on areas with the highest biodiversity, such as the hills of the Western Ghats in southwestern India, and the areas most at risk, policymakers can maximize the number of species protected by the 30x30 program.
But some scientists worry that this doesn't tell the whole story.
The Biodiversity Integrity Index shows that protected areas are effective. The tool has determined that nature is declining at a slower rate within the boundaries of protected areas and parks than in areas outside these boundaries.
This is obviously good news, but it does little to answer the question of what a new protected area should go to 30x30 in development.
There is a growing recognition that certain natural features, such as mountain glaciers or mangrove swamps, contribute greatly to the provision of ecosystem services that are essential for human survival. For example, specific grasslands may be the perfect habitat for the critical pollinating insects our crops depend on, or peat bogs that can help mitigate extreme fluctuations in rainfall.
Known as "critical natural assets", these environments may not be the most biodiverse in any given country and are often mixed with the humans who depend on them, but they also provide a wider range of services to protect our own health and well-being. Unfortunately, they often fall outside protected areas and are at risk of being destroyed.
Dr. Adriana de Parma, a senior researcher at the Natural History Museum's research team, said: "30x30 discussions are usually about species conservation, so we wanted to engage in this debate by understanding how protected areas currently contribute to humanity and the benefits they receive.
If we continue to choose protected areas in the same way as before, then we are putting people at risk. We cannot afford to be complacent.
What is needed now is more data at better resolution to understand what these key natural assets are, where they can be found, and how they interact with areas of land that have been designated for some form of protection.
Then, hopefully, countries** and policymakers will be better positioned to make more informed decisions about which parts of the planet need our strongest protection.