Authors: O'Connor, Louise; Pollock , Laura J. ;Verhagen , Willem;Verburh, Peter H. ;Lavorel, Sandra;Renaud, Julien;Thuiller, Wilfried;

There is an urgent need to protect key areas for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP). However, different values of nature are rarely considered together in conservation planning. We identified and compared priority areas in Europe for three values of nature: (i) biodiversity, represented by 785 terrestrial vertebrate species; (ii) regulating NCP, represented by carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, flood prevention and pollination; and (iii) cultural NCP, represented by heritage forests, heritage agriculture, foraging for wild foods (mushrooms and plants), and nature tourism. We quantified the spatial overlap between these priorities and their performance in representing different values of nature. We found that different priorities rarely coincide, except in certain irreplaceable ecosystems. We also identified priority areas given what is already protected by the Natura 2000 network, which covers about 20% of the EU. We found that Natura 2000 protects 30% of the key areas for NCP, and 36% of vertebrate species distributions on average. Our results show that protecting an additional 5% of land has the potential to double conservation gains for biodiversity while also maintaining some essential NCP, leading to co-benefits for both nature and people.