This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As governments prepare to gather in Yerevan, Armenia, this week for the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP17), new research identifies 13% of Earth's land area as hotspots for biodiversity conservation, highlighting where conservation efforts are most urgently needed.
In their study published in the journal One Earth, an international team of researchers introduces a transparent and reproducible framework for mapping vertebrate conservation hotspots across Earth's terrestrial surface. By analyzing data for 33,604 species of terrestrial vertebrates from the IUCN Red List, the authors combine information on where threatened and range-restricted species concentrate with key human-driven threats such as logging, agriculture, urbanization and invasive species. Approximately 13% of the global land area is identified as a vertebrate hotspot, with many of these areas concentrated in tropical regions and broadleaf forests.
Furthermore, these critical areas are home to over a third of the global human population, emphasizing the need for conservation approaches tailored to local conditions that protect biodiversity while also supporting people's well-being. The findings are particularly timely as national and subnational governments, local authorities, intergovernmental organizations and other state and nonstate actors prepare to review progress in Yerevan and update their commitments toward the 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to be met by 2030. "Identifying areas that are home to exceptionally high levels of unique biodiversity while also facing threats from human activities provides the information decision makers need to help turn the tide on the global biodiversity crisis," explains Piero Visconti, who leads the Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation Group at IIASA.
The approach has several advantages over the original Biodiversity Hotspots approach. The original approach used the number of species found only in a particular region (known as endemism) to identify Biodiversity Hotspots. However, the results can depend on the size of the region and where its boundaries are drawn.
For example, the original Mediterranean hotspot extends inland to include mountain ranges that do not necessarily have a Mediterranean climate. The new approach instead divides the land surface into a grid and combines information on how many species live in each area, giving greater importance to species found in only a few places, with information on their risk of extinction. This makes the results less dependent on how geographic boundaries are defined and allows biodiversity importance to be assessed across different areas.
The original approach also relied on expert-based checklists for broad regions, whereas the new approach uses spatially explicit distribution maps to estimate how many species are expected to occur in a given grid cell or region. Another important advantage of the new approach is that it considers seven major threats to biodiversity, including hunting, pollution, invasive alien species, climate change and different forms of land-use change, whereas the original approach considered only land-use change. "Our findings show that different parts of the world face very different combinations of threats, and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to protecting biodiversity.
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