Authors: Jung, Martin; Chapman, Melissa;Lewis, Matthew;Visconti, Piero;

The new EU Biodiversity strategy specifies that 30% of terrestrial land should be managed for conservation. However present land-use systems often prevent more stringent conservation measures, instead requiring restoration in many intensively used areas while also avoiding leakage effects by displacing land-use changes elsewhere. To estimate the impacts of proposed EU policies, such as the EU Restoration Law or the Farm-2-Fork strategy, on biodiversity, a systems perspective is necessary, that jointly considers both conservation, restoration and anthropogenic land uses. We combine conservation objectives from the EU Biodiversity Strategy with targets and constraints on land uses derived from integrated assessment models customized to European land-use and conservation policies to 2030. Using multi-criteria spatial-planning we then identify areas where conservation and restoration would bring the greatest biodiversity benefits in the future subject to the opportunities and constraints imposed by land-use changes. The results show that considerable trade-offs exist for various taxonomic groups and geographic regions, and that the right areas need to be targeted to maximize benefits. Overall, this work highlights pathways for future efforts to conserve and restore 30% of European land. It furthermore quantitatively evaluates European conservation policies with regards to their upper potential value.