The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature's benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend-nature and its contributions to people-is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature's deterioration.

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Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change

Emerging infectious diseases in humans are frequently caused by pathogens originating from animal hosts, and zoonotic disease outbreaks present a major challenge to global health. To investigate drivers of virus spillover, we evaluated the number of viruses mammalian species have shared with humans. We discovered that the number of zoonotic viruses detected in mammalian species scales positively with global species abundance, suggesting that virus transmission risk has been highest from animal species that have increased in abundance and even expanded their range by adapting to human-dominated landscapes. Domesticated species, primates and bats were identified as having more zoonotic viruses than other species. Among threatened wildlife species, those with population reductions owing to exploitation and loss of habitat shared more viruses with humans. Exploitation of wildlife through hunting and trade facilitates close contact between wildlife and humans, and our findings provide further evidence that exploitation, as well as anthropogenic activities that have caused losses in wildlife habitat quality, have increased opportunities for animal-human interactions and facilitated zoonotic disease transmission. Our study provides new evidence for assessing spillover risk from mammalian species and highlights convergent processes whereby the causes of wildlife population declines have facilitated the transmission of animal viruses to humans.

/pdf/global-shifts-in-mammalian-population-trends-reveal-key-52yjqzklzw.pdf

Global shifts in mammalian population trends reveal key predictors of virus spillover risk.

The United Nations (UN) recently declared 2021 to 2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Against this background, we review recent social-ecological systems research and summarize key themes that could help to improve ecosystem restoration in dynamic social contexts. The themes relate to resilience and adaptability, ecosystem stewardship and navigation of change, relational values, the coevolution of human and ecological systems, long-range social-ecological connections, and leverage points for transformation. We recommend two cross-cutting new research foci; namely: (i) post hoc cross-sectional assessments of social-ecological restoration projects; and (ii) transdisciplinary social-ecological 'living labs' that accompany new restoration projects as they unfold. With global agendas increasingly taking a social-ecological perspective, the recasting of ecosystem restoration as a social-ecological endeavor offers exciting new opportunities for both research and practice.

Making the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration a Social-Ecological Endeavour.

China has 6.6 million km2 of drylands that support approximately 580 million people. These drylands are at risk of desertification. In this Review, the changes observed in China’s drylands are synthesized, with a focus on their drivers and the effects of 13 large-scale land conservation and restoration programmes aimed at mitigating them, including the Three-North Shelterbelt Development Program and Grain for Green Program. After the implementation of the first large-scale restoration programme in 1978, 45.76% of China’s drylands experienced statistically significant land improvement or vegetation greenness, as identified by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. However, activities associated with restoration and conservation projects, such as afforestation, also impose substantial water pressure. Desertification thus remained prevalent during 1980–2015, with 11.43% drylands (especially in north-eastern and north-western drylands) experiencing land degradation or vegetation brownness. Drylands remain at risk of expansion owing to increasing aridity, particularly in semi-arid areas. Future trade-offs between the effects of CO2 fertilization and increased aridity on dryland vegetation cover are still poorly understood. Long-term experiments on the interactions between physical–chemical–biological processes across spatial and temporal scales, such as large-scale field surveys using standardized protocols, are needed to better manage drylands in China and globally. Global drylands are threatened by a combination of anthropogenic climate change and human activities, putting some locations at high risk of desertification. This Review details changes observed in the drylands of China, and the mitigating impact of large-scale restoration and conservation programmes designed to reverse them.

Drivers and impacts of changes in China’s drylands

Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index of lost connectivity, we generate a globally consistent, continuous index of forest condition as determined by the degree of anthropogenic modification. Globally, only 17.4 million km2 of forest (40.5%) has high landscape-level integrity (mostly found in Canada, Russia, the Amazon, Central Africa, and New Guinea) and only 27% of this area is found in nationally designated protected areas. Of the forest inside protected areas, only 56% has high landscape-level integrity. Ambitious policies that prioritize the retention of forest integrity, especially in the most intact areas, are now urgently needed alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and restoring the integrity of forests globally.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2020/05/20/2020.03.05.978858.full.pdf

Modification of forests by people means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

https://www.fs.fed.us/research/publications/misc/94550_2018_scholes.pdf

Summary for policymakers of the assessment report on land degradation and restoration of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The IPBES assessment report on land degradation and restoration

The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt87n6x09m/qt87n6x09m.pdf?t=q6m4v1

Anastasia Brainich

Papers

Summary for policymakers of the assessment report on land degradation and restoration of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The IPBES assessment report on land degradation and restoration

How to halt the global decline of lands