The minimum land area requiring conservation attention to safeguard biodiversity

Ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global biodiversity
crisis. Here, we estimate the minimum land area to secure important
biodiversity areas, ecologically intact areas, and optimal locations for
representation of species ranges and ecoregions. We discover that at least
64 million km2 (44% of terrestrial area) would require conservation
attention (ranging from protected areas to land-use policies) to meet this
goal. Over 1.8 billion people live on these lands, so responses that
promote autonomy, self-determination, equity, and sustainable management
for safeguarding biodiversity are essential. Spatially explicit land-use
scenarios suggest that 1.3 million km2 of this land is at risk of being
converted to intensive human land-uses by 2030, which requires immediate
attention. However, there is a seven-fold difference between the amount of
habitat converted under optimistic and pessimistic land-use scenarios,
highlighting an opportunity to avert this crisis. Appropriate targets in
the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, to encourage conservation of
the identified land, would contribute substantially to safeguarding
biodiversity.