As part of its efforts to map out Europe’s science-policy interface for biodiversity, the BioAgora project has recently co-funded a paper on the correlation between governance objectives for safeguarding the biosphere and realities on the ground for select species groups. Among the group of 36 authors (affiliated with 38 research entities) are seven consortium members of the project. On the side of the National Research Institute on Agriculture, Food & the Environment (INRAE), this includes the study’s lead, postdoctoral fellow Stanislas Rigal, as well as Sandra Luque, Maxime Lenormand and Léa Tardieu. Among the other BioAgora contributors are Tristan Bakx and Lluis Brotons from CREAF and Josef Settele from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ).

The study analyses the effects of climate, land use and land-use intensity on 263 common bird species and 144 common butterfly species using observations from more than 20,000 sites across 26 European countries between 2000 and 2021. These species are modelled so as to understand how their development would be shaped by alternative land-use futures based on the IPBES Nature Futures Framework - Nature for Nature (NFN), Nature for Society (NFS) and Nature as Culture (NAC) - combined with the most sustainability-oriented climate and socio-economic pathway, SSP1 (“Green Road”), from the IPCC. These scenarios thus allow to project potential changes in common biodiversity across Europe up to 2050.

The paper shows that none of the conservation scenarios assessed is sufficient to halt, let alone reverse, the projected decline in the average abundance of common bird and butterfly species. This remains true even under the most biodiversity-friendly scenarios incorporating key EU policies, including the EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, 2030 Forest Strategy and Farm to Fork Strategy.

The decline is particularly pronounced for farmland birds, while grassland butterflies continue to face strong pressures from agricultural intensification and land abandonment. Climate change exacerbates these circumstances, with particularly negative effects on butterflies. Forest species fare relatively better, partly because of expanding forest cover, although intensive forest management continues to increase even under conservation-oriented scenarios.

Importantly, the benefits of conservation scenarios are unevenly distributed across Europe, with stronger improvements projected in Western and Northern Europe and more limited positive effects in eastern and southern regions, where agricultural pressures are increasing.

The findings point to a fundamental challenge: current conservation scenarios largely address how land is managed without fully questioning growing societal demands for agricultural and forest production. This creates persistent trade-offs between production and space for biodiversity.

The results therefore suggest that current conservation aspirations may not be enough to secure the future of Europe's common biodiversity. More ambitious, integrated and transformative pathways are needed to move beyond slowing biodiversity loss towards actually reversing its decline. In other words, a better balance between socio-economic considerations on resource use (a core driver behind current restoration frameworks) and targeted biodiversity conservation commitments is put forward as one of the main solutions on this path. Assuming a broader outlook, this evidence-based vision also corresponds with BioAgora’s own efforts to usher in a new standard for policy-making processes that are grounded in research insights and field data via an EU Science Service for Biodiversity (SSBD).

The full study is available here in the form of an open-access preprint, while a corresponding research article was published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal.

BioAgora receives funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and the UK Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 101059438.

Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the EU nor the EC can be held responsible for them.