Publications

Developments in sectors such as agriculture, wood production, water management and fisheries largely shape the world’s current and future biodiversity, as they exert direct pressures on biodiversity. These sectors depend on biodiversity and ecosystems in various ways to provide food, fiber, wood, bio-energy, fish and clean water for the world’s growing human population. This report looks at how these sectors can contribute to halting the loss of biodiversity and improving its sustainable use. It also presents long-term options for the sectors to reduce their impact on biodiversity.

To improve, speed-up and scale-up the integration of biodiversity within sectors effectively, the authors suggest the following four strategies: (1) use integrated land, water and seascape approaches to reap benefits from ecosystem services across landscapes, inland water and marine environments and deal with trade-offs; (2) heighten the attention to biodiversity within emerging voluntary sustainability initiatives such as standard-setting and certification; (3) strengthen the consumer’s perspective on biodiversity by raising awareness of the impacts of different products and of the importance of biodiversity for food security and a healthy diet; and (4) mobilise finance by improving the business case for biodiversity and green investments and shifting sectoral investment flows in a more biodiversity-friendly direction.

This report is one of two background reports to the fourth Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-4) published by the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

GLOBIO contribution

Following the PBL Roads from Rio+20 report a back-casting methodology has been used to find sectoral options from three different scenarios to achieve global targets on climate change, biodiversity and human development. Biodiversity targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity have been interpreted in terms of the biodiversity indicator Mean Species Abundance (MSA). GLOBIO was used to evaluate whether the targets can be achieved by various options in different production sectors in the three scenarios, resulting in the above mentioned strategies to improve, speed-up and scale-up the integration of biodiversity within sectors effectively.