KEY MESSAGES

Nature and its vital contributions to people, which together embody biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are deteriorating worldwide.

• Nature across most of the globe has now been significantly altered by multiple human drivers, with the great majority of indicators of ecosystems and biodiversity showing rapid decline.

• Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before.

• Globally, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are disappearing. This loss of diversity, including genetic diversity, poses a serious risk to global food security by undermining the resilience of many agricultural systems to threats such as pests, pathogens and climate change.

Direct and indirect drivers of change have accelerated during the past 50 years.

• For terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, land-use change has had the largest relative negative impact on nature since 1970, followed by the direct exploitation, in particular overexploitation, of animals, plants and other organisms, mainly via harvesting, logging, hunting and fishing. In marine ecosystems, direct exploitation of organisms (mainly fishing) has had the largest relative impact, followed by land-/sea-use change.

• Climate change is a direct driver that is increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers on nature and human well-being.

• Many types of pollution, as well as invasive alien species, are increasing, with negative impacts for nature.

• In the past 50 years, the human population has doubled, the global economy has grown nearly fourfold and global trade has grown tenfold, together driving up the demand for energy and materials.

Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors.

• The implementation of policy responses and actions to conserve nature and manage it more sustainably has progressed, yielding positive outcomes relative to scenarios of no intervention, but progress is not sufficient to stem the direct and indirect drivers of nature deterioration. It is therefore likely that most of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 will be missed.

• Current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystems will undermine progress towards 80 per cent (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of Goals related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land (Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, and 15).

• Climate change is projected to become increasingly important as a direct driver of changes in nature and its contributions to people in the next decades. Scenarios show that meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity depends on taking into account climate change impacts in the definition of future goals and objectives.

Nature can be conserved, restored and used sustainably while other global societal goals are simultaneously met through urgent and concerted efforts fostering transformative change.

• Five main interventions (“levers”) can generate transformative change by tackling the underlying indirect drivers of the deterioration of nature: (1) incentives and capacity-building; (2) cross-sectoral cooperation; (3) pre-emptive action; (4) decision-making in the context of resilience and uncertainty; and (5)  environmental law and implementation.

• Transformations towards sustainability are more likely when efforts are directed at the following key leverage points, where efforts yield exceptionally large effects: (1) visions of a good life; (2) total consumption and waste; (3) values and action; (4) inequalities; (5) justice and inclusion in conservation; (6) externalities and telecouplings; (7) technology, innovation and investment; and (8) education and knowledge generation and sharing.

• A key component of sustainable pathways is the evolution of global financial and economic systems to build a global sustainable economy, steering away from the current, limited paradigm of economic growth.