Climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by the mid-century, a new research has found.
Studying changes in land-use patterns and their impacts on biodiversity, an international team of researchers found that biodiversity around the world could have declined by 2-11%. “By including all world regions in our model, we were able to fill many blind spots and address criticism of other approaches working with fragmented and potentially biased data,” said Henrique Pereira, research group head at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and the first author of the study published in the Science journal.
Examining how biodiversity and ecosystems might evolve, the researchers found that the combined effects of land-use change and climate change lead to biodiversity loss across all global regions, regardless of emissions scenario.
