Authors: Cimatti, Marta; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca;Di Marco, Moreno;

Increasing human pressures are driving global biodiversity loss, dramatically affecting the provision of Nature’s Contributions to People. Here, we estimated how preserving regions with a high biodiversity value could reduce the risk of diminishing the provision of NCP, and thus contributing to the achievement of different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We analysed four different scenarios of global environmental change from CMIP6, selecting few data proxies of regulating NCP indicators to measure the change status of NCPs in the future, specifically, the regulation of air quality (NCP3), climate (NCP4) and freshwater quantity (NCP6). For each indicator, we evaluated whether risk from environmental change to the provision of regulating NCPs is higher or lower within priority conservation regions compared to not priority regions.
Our results highlighted that there was an overall increasing trend of NCP3 and NCP4 worldwide, while NCP6 showed contrasting results depending on the area. Furthermore, the change in the provision of NCP was globally higher in regions of high biodiversity value compared to others but there were also many country-specific exceptions. Identifying the relative contribution of high biodiversity areas to NCP provision allowed us to pinpoint possible synergies between the achievement of multiple SDGs under alternative future conditions.