Approaches to defining a planetary boundary for biodiversity
By Georgina M. Mace, Belinda Reyers, Rob Alkemade, Reinette Biggs, F. S. Chapin, Sarah E. Cornell, S. Díaz, S. Jennings, P. Leadley, Peter J. Mumby and 6 more. 2014
296 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The idea that there is an identifiable set of boundaries, beyond which anthropogenic change will put the Earth system outside a safe operating space for humanity, is attracting interest in the scientific community and gaining support in the environmental policy world. Rockstrom et al. (2009) identify nine such boundaries and highlight biodiversity loss as being the single boundary where current rates of extinction put the Earth system furthest outside the safe operating space. Here we review the evidence to support a boundary based on extinction rates and identify weaknesses with this metric and its bearing on humanity's needs. While changes to biodiversity are of undisputed importance, we show that both extinction rate and species richness are weak metrics for this purpose, and they do not scale well from local to regional or global levels. We develop alternative approaches to determine biodiversity loss boundaries and extend our analysis to consider large-scale responses in the Earth system that could affect its suitability for complex human societies which in turn are mediated by the biosphere. We suggest three facets of biodiversity on which a boundary could be based: the genetic library of life; functional type diversity; and biome condition and extent. For each of these we explore the science needed to indicate how it might be measured and how changes would affect human societies. In addition to these three facets, we show how biodiversity's role in supporting a safe operating space for humanity may lie primarily in its interactions with other boundaries, suggesting an immediate area of focus for scientists and policymakers.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Genetics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f3cf6ba6d104f3419f4917286c85c0228e80c16
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Citations in the corpus
- Equity and sustainability in the Anthropocene: a social–ecological systems perspective on their intertwined futures (2018, background): “The interaction dynamics could also be altered by recognizing and supporting pathways that not only do not take up more ecological space, but contribute positively to earth system restoration and to buffering the global population from future change [11,66].”
- The adaptive capacity of lake food webs: from individuals to ecosystems (2016, background): “…that goes beyond conserving species numbers and towards protecting the biological structure and functional species interactions that are responsible for sustaining energy and nutrient fl ow at an ecosystem level (Soulé et al. 2003 , Gray et al. 2014 , Mace et al. 2014 , Travis et al. 2014 ).”
- Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet (2015, background): “trogen (5), biosphere integrity (7), freshwater use (5, 63), and novel entities [with a focus on chem-”
- Interactions among ecosystem stressors and their importance in conservation (2016, background): “Their cumulative effects are eroding biodiversity [4], triggering concerns that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction [5] and approaching a planetary-scale tipping point [6,7].”
- Land use options for staying within the Planetary Boundaries – Synergies and trade-offs between global and local sustainability goals (2018, background): “While science is exploring and further developing each of the PBs in more detail (e.g. de Vries et al., 2013; Gerten et al., 2013; Mace et al., 2014; Newbold et al., 2016), there has been far less attention to the planetary opportunities for sustainable development within the PBs (DeFries et al.,…”