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Targeting degraded areas in forested landscapes for restoration could deliver rapid climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, improve resilience of forested lands to future climate change, and potentially reduce the trade‐offs between nature recovery and agriculture. Although the importance of forest restoration for climate mitigation is acknowledged, current estimates of its climate mitigation potential may be underestimated because they focus predominantly on reforesting cleared areas. We built on recent analyses of forest integrity and unrealized forest biomass potential to examine the potential for restoring the integrity of degraded forests. There are over 1.5 billion ha of forests worldwide that retain 50–80% of their potential biomass. Prioritizing restoration in these areas could deliver rapid biodiversity and climate mitigation benefits, relative to restoring forest on cleared land. We applied a spatial planning approach to demonstrate how restoration interventions can be targeted to support the conservation of high‐integrity forest, a potential pathway to the delivery of the 30×30 goal of the Convention on Biodiversity's Global Biodiversity Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activities such as urbanization, infrastructure and agriculture are driving global biodiversity declines. In an attempt to balance economic development goals with biodiversity conservation, governments and industry apply a decision‐making framework known as the mitigation hierarchy, with a goal of achieving no net loss or net gain outcomes for biodiversity. Successful application of the mitigation hierarchy requires biodiversity assessments and spatial planning to inform the design of mitigation policies, identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation and impact avoidance, assess the biodiversity impacts of developments, and identify appropriate mitigation measures including offsetting residual impacts. However, guidance on the necessary data and assessment techniques is often lacking, especially in countries where formal mitigation policies do not exist or are in their infancy. Here, we discuss and demonstrate analyses that can help answer some key questions for formulating effective mitigation policies and applying the mitigation hierarchy. We focus on data and analyses that can inform the avoidance and offset steps in particular, and demonstrate these techniques using a case study in Mozambique. While these analyses will not replace field‐based assessments for projects, they offer rapid, low‐cost approaches to support scoping and development of mitigation policy, planning and decision‐making, especially in relatively data‐poor regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To ensure the long-term persistence of biodiversity, conservation strategies must account for the entire range of climate change impacts. A variety of spatial prioritisation techniques have been developed to incorporate climate change. Here, we provide the first standardised review of these approaches. Using a systematic search, we analysed peer-reviewed spatial prioritisation publications (n = 46) and found that the most common approaches (n = 41, 89%) utilised forecasts of species distributions and aimed to either protect future species habitats (n = 24, 52%) or identify climate refugia to shelter species from climate change (n = 17, 37%). Other approaches (n = 17, 37%) used well-established conservation planning principles to combat climate change, aimed at broadly increasing either connectivity (n = 11, 24%) or the degree of heterogeneity of abiotic factors captured in the planning process (n = 8, 17%), with some approaches combining multiple goals. We also find a strong terrestrial focus (n = 35, 76%), and heavy geographical bias towards North America (n = 8, 17%) and Australia (n = 11, 24%). While there is an increasing trend of incorporating climate change into spatial prioritisation, we found that serious gaps in current methodologies still exist. Future research must focus on developing methodologies that allow planners to incorporate human responses to climate change and recognise that discrete climate impacts (e.g. extreme events), which are increasing in frequency and severity, must be addressed within the spatial prioritisation framework. By identifying obvious gaps and highlighting future research needs this review will help practitioners better plan for conservation action in the face of multiple threats including climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the magnitude and the extent of recent change of significant human footprint within protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the habitat range of 308 lowland forest specialist birds in Sundaland, a global hotspot of biodiversity in Southeast Asia. Using the most recent human footprint dataset, we find that 70% of Sundaland has been heavily modified by humans. This represents a 55% increase in areas under intense human pressure since 1993. Areas under intense human pressure covered on average 50% of the extent of key biodiversity areas, 78% of each protected area and 38% of the range of lowland forest specialist birds. The results imply that the actual level of protection by protected areas is only one‐third to half of that on paper once human footprint is accounted for. While all protected areas were impacted by human pressures, those managed strictly for biodiversity conservation presented the largest increases. These results highlight an exceptionally high human footprint across Sundaland and an impending further deepening of the biodiversity crisis across the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of armed conflict on deforestation in biodiverse regions across Earth remains poorly understood. Its association with factors like illegal crop cultivation can obscure its effect on deforestation patterns. We used Colombia, a global biodiversity hotspot with a complex political history, to explore the association of both armed conflict and coca cultivation with deforestation patterns. We generated spatial predictions of deforestation pressure based on the period 2000–2015 to understand how armed conflict and coca cultivation are associated with spatial patterns of deforestation and assess the spatial distribution of deforestation pressure induced by armed conflict and coca cultivation. Deforestation was positively associated with armed conflict intensity and proximity to illegal coca plantations. A deforestation model including 14 variables was 78% accurate in predicting deforestation at a 10 km2 resolution. On their own armed conflict and coca cultivation had a notable effect, particularly in the Amazon, but in combination with other variables it was small. Deforestation pressure induced by armed conflict and coca cultivation was highest in Tumaco and Catatumbo regions and in la Macarena, Sierra Nevada and San Lucas mountains—all areas of high biodiversity and conservation importance. In some regions, lack of governance after the peace accords is increasing armed conflict, and our results suggest that those increases in conflict may increase deforestation in those areas. The methods used here can be replicated to help understand the complex ways in which armed conflict affects deforestation patterns in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]