Road to COP30: Brazil shows how protecting nature can protect ourselves

The world’s animals, plants and many other forms of life are declining at an unprecedented rate.

With more than a million species at risk of extinction, the world’s ecosystems are being stretched more than ever before. This threatens the critical ecosystem services that they provide, such as supplying clean water, fresh air and food.

One way of understanding this is to study their Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), which represents how the presence and abundance of species changes as a result of human pressures. In this analysis, 100% represents a pristine, untouched ecosystem, while anything under 90% is considered to be beyond the safe limit.

The latest stocktake suggests that the world’s average BII has dropped below 60% and is continuing to fall. Biodiversity intactness is also falling in protected areas – and even faster than the rest of the world.

Tackling these declines will mean changing how we prioritise and manage the areas of the world we look after, and how protected areas are managed.

Dr Gonzalo Albaladejo-Robles, one of our bioinformaticians who analysed the data, says that there needs to be more of a focus on the ecosystem services that help tackle climate change, protect homes from extreme weather and much more.

“It’s important to protect biodiversity, but much of the time this biodiversity doesn’t have a direct impact on human communities,” Gonzalo explains. “We’ve seen that we’re not doing a good job of protecting the ecosystem services, so we need to strike a better balance between protecting biodiversity and these processes.”

“By getting local communities involved with these discussions, we can make sure that these are policies that everyone can support. This will be tricky and it’s going to take a lot of time, but our progress towards our current nature targets took time and shows it can be done.”

A spotlight on Brazil

Ahead of COP30 in November, some of our scientists looked at Brazil’s BII as an example. Brazil is home to vital ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado grasslands, which play important roles in the biodiversity and climate of the entire world.

Compared to the rest of the world, Brazil is performing well against biodiversity targets. More than 30% of its land is protected, meeting 30 by 30 goals, and nature in these areas is generally intact, with a BII of 88.82%.

However, analysis by the team shows that the BII of these protected areas fell between 2000 and 2020. The declines are focused on the edges of the Amazon basin, where protected areas are exposed to the impacts of deforestation and cattle farming happening in nearby unprotected sites.

Instead, it was actually the degraded land outside of these protected areas that was showing signs of improvement.

“What really struck me was that most of the areas demonstrating an improvement in biodiversity intactness are located outside of protected areas,” Gonzalo says. “While this may be due to the recovery of degraded land, the abandonment of farmlands, or management interventions, it raises questions about the effectiveness of conservation policies within protected areas.”

Reimagining protected areas

The team also found that Brazil’s protected areas might not be safeguarding the critical ecosystem services that all life relies on, such as cleaning water or supporting pollinators. They found that only around a fifth of the land that’s most crucial for these important natural processes is currently protected, with the rest lying outside their boundaries.

The average BII of these areas of Brazil has fallen from 65.11% to 63.47% between 2000 and 2020. However, this small decline masks bigger falls in other areas important for nature, such as mangrove forests.

These woodlands lock away carbon and provide a habitat for growing fish, among many other ecosystem services, but they’re under threat. More than half of mangrove ecosystems are at risk of collapse, and in Brazil, the BII of mangrove woodlands fell by over 5%.

Brazil isn’t alone in this, with just 22% of the land delivering the most critical ecosystem services found in protected areas. But these protected areas are under pressure, with their BII dropping by more than the global average.

In order to better support ecosystem services, the researchers have called for a reinvention of what protected areas are. Rather than just protecting unoccupied areas of land, these should be sites that contain important ecosystems that are most in need of being looked after.

In addition, once the sites are designated as protected areas then they shouldn’t just be left alone. They should be areas which are actively cared for, with changes in biodiversity monitored and used to inform overall management.

The team hope that their calls will be heard in Belem for COP30, which is set to begin in just over a month’s time. Delegates will discuss how climate and biodiversity policy can work together, presenting an opportunity to think about how protected areas can work for both wildlife and the atmosphere.

Emma Woods, our Director of Policy & Partnerships, says that “just protecting 30% of any land isn’t enough.”

“We have to conserve the precious land that helps deliver our food, energy, raw materials and clean water, and ultimately enables climate mitigation and adaptation.”

“Critical ecosystems are just that, our planetary life support system and without them we would struggle to survive. Conserving them should be non-negotiable but will require a rethink and join-up of climate and nature strategies which we hope COP30 can deliver.”