Investigating biodiversity trends in different mitigation scenarios with a national integrated assessment model

ABSTRACT

The inclusion of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in climate mitigation pathways is critical and can be reached by assessing their consequences through the deployment of appropriate indicators to that end. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are important tools for understanding possible impacts caused by adopting new policies. We investigate terrestrial biodiversity trends (life on land: SDG 15) for three different climate mitigation scenarios for Brazil: (1) A scenario compatible with a world that maintains its current policies with current deforestation rates in the Amazon and the Cerrado biomes; (2) A scenario in which Brazil fulfils its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC); and (3) A scenario compatible with a world that limits warming to 1.5°C. We use the Brazilian Land-Use and Energy System model (BLUES), a national IAM, to show the implications of the transitions involved in the above-mentioned scenarios for the country up to 2050. We conduct a post-processing analysis using consolidated biodiversity indicators to emphasize how different IAM greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions mitigation solutions present distinct positive and negative potential impacts on biodiversity in Brazil. However, our analysis does not consider the impacts associated with climate change, but only the risks imposed by mitigation policies. Our results indicate that biodiversity loss decreases in the scenarios from (1) to (3), implying that stronger climate change mitigation actions could result in smaller biodiversity losses. We conclude that Brazil has the opportunity to align its biodiversity and climate goals through nature-based solutions (NBS), such as forest conservation, restoration, pasture recovery, and the use of crop-pasture and agroforestry systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Integrated assessment models
• biodiversity
• climate mitigation
• land-use
• land-cover
• SDG

Acknowledgments

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement nº 821471 (ENGAGE) and grant agreement nº 821124 (NAVIGATE). Additionally, the authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil) and the National Institute of Science and Technology (INCT, Brazil). We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers that helped us improve the manuscript considerable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1943815X.2023.2239323

Notes

1. It is approximately 516 metres x 516 metres in the Equator.

2. The cost categories in BLUES vary from A to F, where A is the region with lowest costs for any culture while F is the most expensive one.

3. GtCO₂ = Billion tonnes of CO₂.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior .