Escalating human pressures are driving global biodiversity loss, and this has dramatic effect over the provision of Nature's Contributions to People (NCP). This combined impact on biodiversity and its contributions to humanity means that conserving important biodiversity areas can have a double benefit. But how much do NCP depend on important biodiversity areas? Here I will estimate how protecting areas recognised as having high biodiversity value could reduce the risk of decline of NCP, thus contributing to the achievement of different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Conserving these areas would protect life on land trough biodiversity conservation, but would also support other SDGs, e.g. SDG 3 (good health and well-being), SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation) and SDG 13 (climate action). I will analyse four scenarios of global environmental change from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6), and evaluated risk to the provision of regulating NCPs, i.e. regulation of air quality, climate, freshwater quantity, and detrimental organisms. I will estimate such risk both within areas of high biodiversity value and other physically similar areas within the same country, to determine the avoided risk to humanity that might derive from biodiversity conservation. For each NCP indicator, I will evaluate whether risk from environmental change is higher or lower within areas of high biodiversity value compared to their counterparts. Identifying the relative contribution of important biodiversity areas to NCP provision will allow to pinpoint synergies between the achievement of multiple SDGs.
Environmental degradation caused by land use change, climate change and unsustainable use of natural resources is causing an accelerating decline of the world's stocks of biological diversity and the depletion of ecosystems services. Recent dramatic events like the COVID-19 pandemic, megafires in Australia and California and swarm of locust in East Africa, highlight the interconnectedness between human, animal, and environmental well-being. Nevertheless, despite of the high rates of global biodiversity and ecosystem services loss, international investments and policy intervention followed a reactive approach, being largely focused on post-emergence, response and adaptation to environmental and health crisis. Thus, in order to tackle the biodiversity crisis, we need to implement proactive approaches and focus on prevention and mitigation of the effects of global change. This will be the first study investigating the quantitative relationship between priority areas for biodiversity conservation and the NCPs they provide, and their responses to global change. Comparing the rate of provision of NCPs inside and outside conservation priority regions will allow me to estimate the value of conserving these areas, in terms of carbon sequestration, air quality and water quantity regulation and reduced risk of zoonotic disease emergence and make inferences about the risk of that global change poses to conservation priority regions. Additionally, the multidisciplinary potential of this project will allow to provide a spatial approach for stakeholders and policy makers to identify regions of important conservation value that contribute the most to people's good quality of life. Finally, this study is also timely given the current debate around the the post-2020 Framework of the CBD, especially Action Targets 1 and 2 aiming at increasing the percentage of land under sustainable management.