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To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, countries and the international community require clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially, and multiple targets be pursued concurrently1. To support governments and political conventions, spatial guidance is needed to identify which areas should be managed for conservation to generate the greatest synergies between biodiversity and nature’s contribution to people (NCP). Here we present results from a joint optimization that maximizes improvements in species conservation status, carbon retention and water provisioning and rank terrestrial conservation priorities globally. We found that, selecting the top-ranked 30% (respectively 50%) of areas would conserve 62.4% (86.8%) of the estimated total carbon stock and 67.8% (90.7%) of all clean water provisioning, in addition to improving the conservation status for 69.7% (83.8%) of all species considered. If priority was given to biodiversity only, managing 30% of optimally located land area for conservation may be sufficient to improve the conservation status of 86.3% of plant and vertebrate species on Earth. Our results provide a global baseline on where land could be managed for conservation. We discuss how such a spatial prioritisation framework can support the implementation of the biodiversity and climate conventions.

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Humanity will soon define a new era for nature—one that seeks to transform decades of underwhelming responses to the global biodiversity crisis. Area-based conservation efforts, which include both protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, are likely to extend and diversify. However, persistent shortfalls in ecological representation and management effectiveness diminish the potential role of area-based conservation in stemming biodiversity loss. Here we show how the expansion of protected areas by national governments since 2010 has had limited success in increasing the coverage across different elements of biodiversity (ecoregions, 12,056 threatened species, ‘Key Biodiversity Areas’ and wilderness areas) and ecosystem services (productive fisheries, and carbon services on land and sea). To be more successful after 2020, area-based conservation must contribute more effectively to meeting global biodiversity goals—ranging from preventing extinctions to retaining the most-intact ecosystems—and must better collaborate with the many Indigenous peoples, community groups and private initiatives that are central to the successful conservation of biodiversity. The long-term success of area-based conservation requires parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to secure adequate financing, plan for climate change and make biodiversity conservation a far stronger part of land, water and sea management policies.

Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity and stabilizing the climate of the Earth. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria optimization approach that identifies priority areas for restoration across all terrestrial biomes, and estimates their benefits and costs. We find that restoring 15% of converted lands in priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 299 gigatonnes of CO2—30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The inclusion of several biomes is key to achieving multiple benefits. Cost effectiveness can increase up to 13-fold when spatial allocation is optimized using our multicriteria approach, which highlights the importance of spatial planning. Our results confirm the vast potential contributions of restoration to addressing global challenges, while underscoring the necessity of pursuing these goals synergistically.

Despite projections of a severe extinction event, a window of opportunity is now open for a mix of policies to avoid biodiversity collapse in the Cerrado hotspot.

Deforestation is a major source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the greatest single driver of species extinctions. The reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been formally recognized as a climate change mitigation option. REDD might have important co-benefits for biodiversity conservation yet the extent of these benefits will depend on as-yet untested associations between fine-scale spatial patterns of deforestation, species distributions and carbon stocks. Here we combine a global land-use model and spatial data on species distributions to explore scenarios of future deforestation within REDD-eligible countries, to quantify and map the potential impacts on species extinctions as increased by forest loss and decreased by carbon conservation. We found that the continuation of historical deforestation rates is likely to result in large numbers of species extinctions, but that an adequately funded REDD programme could substantially reduce these losses. Under our deforestation scenarios, the projected benefits of REDD were remarkably consistent across the four methods used to estimate extinctions, but spatially variable, and highly dependent on the level of carbon payments. Our results indicate that, if well designed, adequately funded and broadly implemented, carbon-based forest conservation could play a major role in biodiversity conservation as well as climate change mitigation.