COS 79-3 - CANCELLED - How burden sharing impacts the efficacy of area-based conservation targets

Abstract:

In an effort to halt biodiversity loss and safeguard nature's contributions to people (NCP), the Convention on Biological Diversity recently adopted the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework (CBD, 2022). Largely coalesced around area-based conservation targets (e.g., protecting 30% of lands and waters by 2030), this framework is influencing hundreds of regional, national and sub-national conservation policies around the world as governments pledge to expand the protection of their biodiversity assets. It remains to be seen how the “burden” (e.g., area covered) of meeting these global area-based targets is likely to be distributed between countries and/or subnational jurisdictions. Moreover, the impact of different scenarios of international and subnational burden sharing on the biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation contributions of these policies has yet to be assessed. This question is particularly pertinent given the nonuniform distributions of biodiversity and carbon.

We use linear programming to spatially optimize the allocation of restoration and conservation measures across different land-cover types to maximize species conservation and carbon sequestration objectives of 2030 biodiversity targets, subject to projected crop, pasture, and forestry production constraints. We explore two scales of burden sharing (international and subnational) using the European Union and the United States as respective, and comparative, case studies. We focus on how different scenarios of realizing area based targets impacts the possible bioiversity and climate mitigation outcomes of those targets. Specifically, we show how meeting 30% conservation targets strategically in each country in the EU or each subnational jurisdiction in the US reduces the efficacy of 2030 policy across biodiversity and carbon objectives, but differentially benefits some species over others. We also show how this shifts the tradeoffs between meeting climate mitigation and biodiversity targets. We show how alternative scenarios of burden sharing (allowing area based targets to be unequally distributed across political jurisdictions) might improve the overall efficacy of policy options to mitigate climate change and reduce biodiversity loss, but realizing this potential will require cooperation and negotiation between jurisdictions. This work provides insight into devising robust spatial allocation strategies to meet timely conservation policy targets. The results contribute to discussions around how and where international cooperation can encourage more efficient and equitable implementation of global conservation targets.