Mitigation and adaptation strategies to reverse biodiversity decline

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity aims to “take urgent action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss”, despite the fact that the underlying drivers of change (i.e., human consumption levels) continue to increase at a global scale. Following the framing of climate change policy, this review aims to identify conservation policies and technologies that can be articulated as ‘mitigation’ measures, which seek to reduce the total environmental footprint generated by people. These aim to break or circumvent cause-effect relationships that adversely affect biodiversity and human wellbeing. Illustrating this approach for food production and consumption, it is possible to identify a number of potential social policies and transitions (e.g., in relation to diets, economic norms and equitability) and emerging technological mitigation measures (e.g., microbial and cellular food production and waste-reduction technologies) that could, if supported and scaled up, virtually eliminate food-related drivers (causes) of global biodiversity decline within the coming century, and thereby achieve long-term ecosystem recovery. By contrast, most current biodiversity conservation can be regarded as resisting the consequences of environmental change, rather than addressing the causes. In relation to food, many conservation successes reduce agricultural intensity or the extraction of other resources from particular locations (e.g., by rewilding, restoring and de-intensifying farmland), so they risk shifting the same demand-driven pressures elsewhere (known as ‘leakage’) instead of addressing the underlying challenge. Conventional conservation protection and management will still be required, but it would be more effective if conservation strategies were re-articulated as ‘adaptation’, a flexible balance between facilitating, accepting and resisting change. The conclusion is that recent biodiversity trends cannot be halted or reversed at a planetary-scale unless the underlying human-associated production and consumptive causes of environmental change are addressed. Mitigation policies that recognise, reduce and replace the drivers of biodiversity change are achievable, but Convention on Biological Diversity and other institutional changes will be required to develop parallel but distinct mitigation and adaptation work streams.