5 Delivering Change

T he forum’s final session shifted from thinking about how to measure biodiversity to how to deliver real change on the ground. In doing that, this session explored how on-the-ground fieldwork and global surveys of biodiversity can inform conservation frameworks, understanding of ecosystem services, and specific, targeted conservation goals.

DELIVERING CHANGE FOR CONSERVATION

Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International (BCI), explained that bats provide a powerful focus for conservation. They are diverse and widespread, with at least 1,487 species and occurring on every continent. They provide quantifiable ecosystem services to human economies and ecosystems through crop predation, pollination, and seed dispersal, and by providing guano for fertilizer. Bats are sensitive to environmental change and so they serve as bioindicators, and they inspire action through our fascination with them as animals and their cultural and societal importance. Unfortunately, there are many ongoing threats to bats that largely mirror the threats other species are facing, Frick said. Top-level threats include logging, agriculture, and hunting, but wind farms also kill large numbers of bats.

While the previous speakers have noted the massive amount of data available for biodiversity work, this is not the case for bats. Bat diversity is concentrated in the Global South, but there is a real data deficiency problem, especially in highly biodiverse regions (see Figure 5-1). To begin remedying this deficit, BCI has implemented a continental-scale monitoring program for bats, called the North American Bat Monitoring Program, born out of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s response to white-nose syndrome, an imported fungal disease that has killed 90 percent of three species of hibernating bats in eastern North America. This effort has generated 1.3 million records and developed status and trend reports for 12 species, with 15 more in preparation. Frick noted this program is in immediate danger of being defunded and decommissioned.

BCI, said Frick, is implementing ground conservation projects worldwide and is measuring and articulating how bat conservation can benefit global stakeholders, global biodiversity framework targets, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (see Figure 5-2). She and her colleagues are developing its next strategic plan to guide BCI through 2030.

BCI has expanded its efforts over the past 5 years to include projects in 21 countries, each conducted in partnership with local communities and most having a single-species focus. Frick noted that 14 species of bats are now protected under BCI-led initiatives, including 33 percent of critically endangered species. Over the next 2 years, BCI will begin 14 new initiatives. One project, for example, has saved Hildegard’s tomb bat, a cave-roosting bat living in coastal caves in Kenya, from extinction. Its historic range was coastal Kenya and Tanzania, but it is now present in

only a few caves, all near local communities. Frick noted that these communities appreciated the importance of the bats, but there was a great deal of debate on the best way to save them.

What one community settled on was creating nurseries and reforesting the area around the local cave that had been degraded by firewood collection. BCI helped the community build local nurseries that not only provide trees the community could plant in their area but sell to other communities, providing a sustainable income. In addition, the community now has a real identity around protecting this cave. This has helped the Hildegard’s tomb bat as well as the 13 species that live in the cave with them.

GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY MONITORING TO MEASURE PROGRESS AND GUIDE ACTION

Andrew Gonzalez, professor and the Liber Ero Chair in Biodiversity Conservation at McGill University and co-chair of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), explained that GEO BON is a network of 3,500 people in 153 countries working toward building a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) designed to support action to drive outcomes under the global biodiversity framework. He noted that monitoring is not a passive activity that allows for checking the state of nature occasionally, but one that can drive action at the local and regional levels. The way to accomplish that, he added, is not via a top-down approach centered in Geneva or Paris, but to build a globally federated network of existing biodiversity observation networks.

Unfortunately, said Gonzalez, there are enormous geographic, taxonomic, and economic biases and inequities in the existing monitoring system, resulting in species records at a 5-kilometer resolution that cover less than 7 percent of the world’s surface (see Figure 5-3), with the data gaps being even more profound at smaller resolution. Moreover, 85 percent of the data in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility come from 10 countries, with 80 percent of the data coming from birds and 85 percent from observations within a kilometer of a road. Solving this shortfall requires effective country participation; addressing data sovereignty, gaps, and inequities; developing data-to-indicator standards; and encouraging multilateral collaboration.

Bending the curve on biodiversity monitoring requires connecting how the state of nature is observed and how to assess and report progress. “If those two things are not done seamlessly, the reporting will be decoupled and disconnected from the reality on the ground,” said Gonzalez. In his view, “building GBiOS will provide the collective evidence that we are bending the curve, not just in some very high-level summary overview of the number of species extinctions that have happened planetarily over the last 50 years, but down in the scale where people are living and experiencing nature change.”

Gonzalez said GEO BON has spent the past 15 years developing standards and guidelines for how to build the essential units of a GBiOS. Building such a network, he said, is a social process of engagement, assessment, design, and implementation that takes coordination, resources, and coming together across all sectors of society. He noted that a biodiversity observation network comprises a network of sites, including field stations, university sites, and protected areas where monitoring occurs.

What GEO BON is doing is coordinating that monitoring to address drivers and changing states of nature while integrating both traditional and new technologies and building a diversity knowledge service. Gonzalez views this as analogous to a meteorological service for biodiversity information developed to be interpretable and usable by all. “If we follow the standards we have been talking about in the last day and a half, then we have an interoperable network-of-networks

where we can start combining information to assess how biodiversity is changing from the local to the regional to the global level,” said Gonzalez.

Given that biodiversity changes differently at different scales, it is crucial to address the scale problem. One project that aims to address the scale issue is ongoing in the James Bay area of northern Canada. This area is the second-largest peatland carbon complex in the world, and it is evaporating rapidly because of climate change. This project involves the Cree communities living along the border of James Bay and uses data from satellite and other technologies along with

qualitative information the Cree communities are providing. This biodiversity observation network will be incorporated into a Canada-wide network he is trying to assemble.

Gonzalez proposed three key questions to guide future efforts:

• What scale and intensity of local, national, and global biodiversity monitoring effects are needed to reliably detect changing trends?
• How critical is international data openness and interoperability?
• What are the benefits of targeted investments in monitoring and data infrastructure, particularly for nations with modest capacities?

Regarding the last question, he noted that the ninth iteration of the Global Environment Facility will focus on helping countries with modest capacities get to where they need to be rapidly.

Currently, Gonzalez is building a GBiOS digital twin to guide planetary monitoring. This digital twin will allow adjusting various parameters, such as observation error, data-sharing capacity, baseline biodiversity and change, national monitoring versus international networks, and investment scenarios, to test their effects on the power to detect and attribute trends. Using the digital twin, for example, he found that increasing the number of sites in a national biodiversity observation network and the effective number of countries participating in GBiOS increased the power to detect a global trend. “That demonstrates the importance of collaboration, sharing, interoperability, and investment,” said Gonzalez. “By sharing, we lift everybody. We increase the capacity to detect change and use that information to drive conservation action.”

Gonzalez concluded his remarks by noting the need to deliver change:

• Acknowledge, quantify, and address uncertainty in trend detection and attribution.
• Invest in monitoring and data infrastructure, particularly in countries and regions with modest capacity.
• Balance national monitoring intensity with global participation.
• Prioritize and incentivize data sharing and standards.

HUMANITY’S EFFECT ON EARTH’S WILDLIFE FROM A BIOMASS PERSPECTIVE

Ron Milo, professor of systems biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, said a big challenge for the biodiversity community is building a bridge between the many orders of magnitude of information about biodiversity, the state of nature, and how it affects humanity and the limited attention span and amount of information people are willing to absorb today so that it would

move them to act. As an example of how one might approach this problem, he discussed how it would be possible to estimate the weight of all the fish in the world. To start, he would collect as much information from the literature with fish biomass measurements at various locations around the world and then find a way to extrapolate that to other locations. To do that, he would try to correlate those observations with environmental parameters such as temperature and primary productivity and, using the distribution of those parameters, extrapolate across the globe and derive a global estimate.

Plants dominate global biomass, accounting for approximately 90 percent, followed by bacteria at approximately 5 percent, with arthropods and fish dominating animal biomass (see Figure 5-4). It turns out that sometime around 2020, human-produced mass exceeded the planet’s biomass (see Figure 5-5).

Milo showed other examples of data presented in a manner that the average person can absorb and perhaps appreciate, including the biomass distribution of mammals and how that has changed since 1850, showing that domesticated animals, particularly cattle, are the dominant source, followed by humans, with wild marine and terrestrial mammals accounting for approximately 5 percent of the mammalian biomass. Another example showed that while whale and other marine mammal populations have recovered, their numbers still pale compared to pre-commercial whaling days. Milo said the reason he likes using wild biomass as a metric is that weight is something people understand intuitively, as opposed to the number of species.

USING BIODIVERSITY MEASURES AS A POLICYMAKER

When thinking about how to make biodiversity measures actionable by policymakers, Ann Bartuska, senior advisor at Resources for the Future, said it is important to identify the tangible questions that policymakers or decision makers are being asked, whether their concerns are local, national, or global. She noted that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ summaries for policymakers are a good example of how to create summaries that policymakers can use.

Bartuska questioned if there is a hierarchical structure that can help integrate data from different systems. In forestry, for example, the Forest Inventory and Analysis program has collected more than 85 years of annual measurements, building a foundation of knowledge about U.S. forests. Over time, more indicator-based measurements, such as indicators of air pollution, ozone, and insect and disease occurrence, have been added to that knowledge base to address questions about forest health as they have emerged. Researchers have also used that system to track what is happening to carbon stored in the nation’s forests. She noted that many of these measurements come from a few locations, determined using a probability-based system, to provide a deeper dive on some of the biology and physics affecting the forests.

Going forward, Bartuska said there is a need to think about how data from GEO BON, the Earth BioGenome Project, and the various deeper dives researchers have made fit together. She also noted the importance of getting rid of jargon in the materials aimed at policymakers and the public. As an example, she cited the National Academies’ 2022 publication Biodiversity at Risk: Today’s Choices Matter, which was written in plain language and then translated by another organization into lesson plans for educators that 5,000 educators are now using in their classes.

On a final note, Bartuska recounted a meeting between a group of scientists and a congressional representative and their staff. One of her colleagues had a briefing paper filled with references and data tables, while another brought one satellite image. “What do you think carried the weight of the conversation? It was that single satellite image,” she said.