Towards Net Positive Impacts on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

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Despite decades of warnings and increasingly dire assessments, the rate of biodiversity loss has not slowed and climate change continues, unabated. To achieve global sustainability will require a shift in thinking. For decades, scientists and policymakers have strived to slow the decline of biodiversity, the loss of habitat, and the rate of climate change. This approach, of aiming to slow losses, is proving to be insufficient. For this reason, within the UN's recent global biodiversity assessment, Professor Kai Chan and others have called international attention to the goal of net-positive change for nature and its crucial contributions to humanity. Through his own work and that of his lab, Professor Chan is addressing a provocative question: how do we navigate towards net positive change in biodiversity and ecosystem services in a world that is still rapidly eroding them? This crucial question has both social and natural-science components: the latter is the focus here. What changes in nature and its contributions to people are likely to occur due to ongoing economic development and climate change? And how can these changes (due to land-use change, pollution, harvest, and other direct drivers) be mitigated most cost-effectively for species at risk, recreation, water quality, pollination, carbon storage, and food provision? Can the expected negative impacts be lessened via existing mitigation options, or would attaining net-positive outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystem services require substantial changes to the path of economic development? In this Discovery Grant research, Professor Chan's lab group and colleagues will ask these questions in two systems: the Metro Vancouver Region, and the West Coast of Vancouver Island. The two systems represent starkly different degrees of direct human impact, although they are very close geographically: Metro Vancouver is urban, with 2.5 million people living in ~3,000 km2, while the West Coast of Vancouver Island is a 300 km stretch of wild coast with few people (~12,000 in ~16,000 km2). Both systems are known for their biodiversity and ecosystem services, and for their conservation; both are economically dependent on nature, to varying degrees. Answering these questions will require ecosystem and ecosystem service modelling, spatial analysis, literature review, expert elicitation, and new ecological fieldwork. The answers provided will be preliminary; they will cover only a subset of the issues, species, and ecosystem services of interest; but they will provide a critical starting point for stakeholders and decision-makers to contemplate what it will take to shift our economic and social systems from a parasitic and self-destructive role on planet Earth to a mutualistic and sustainable one.