A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets.

The Global Deal for Nature (GDN) is a time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. Pairing the GDN and the Paris Climate Agreement would avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services. New findings give urgency to this union: Less than half of the terrestrial realm is intact, yet conserving all native ecosystems-coupled with energy transition measures-will be required to remain below a 1.5°C rise in average global temperature. The GDN targets 30% of Earth to be formally protected and an additional 20% designated as climate stabilization areas, by 2030, to stay below 1.5°C. We highlight the 67% of terrestrial ecoregions that can meet 30% protection, thereby reducing extinction threats and carbon emissions from natural reservoirs. Freshwater and marine targets included here extend the GDN to all realms and provide a pathway to ensuring a more livable biosphere.

The quantification of biodiversity: an esoteric quest or a vital component of sustainable development?

Biodiversity relates to sustainable development through a series of direct and indirect uses. These include direct harvest, nature tourism, wild genes improving domestic crops, wild species contributing to crop productivity, pest management, sources of medicine and bioremediation (biologically based environmental clean-up). Biodiversity relates through services, individual species indicating environmental change or stress, insights into the life sciences and increasingly today, through wealth generated from biodiversity at the level of the molecule. Sustainable development relates to the quantification of biodiversity through organizing information to enable the foregoing activities. It also relates in little-explored ways to ecosystem function, stability and resilience. Biodiversity is already a proven indicator of environmental change in freshwater systems.