>我们,作为2024年12月在中国郑州召开的“第七届国际生态峰会”的与会者,齐聚一堂,携手应对当前全球面临的紧迫生态危机与挑战,致力于推动人类与自然和谐相处,构建人与自然命运共同体,并于2024年12月“第七届国际生态峰会”通过本宣言.在生态文明理念的指引下,本宣言重申我们的坚定承诺:加快推进生态修复进程,建立健全可持续管理机制(包括公共资产信托),切实守护地球健康,保障当代及子孙后代的福祉.

Advanced remote sensing shows illegal deforestation as it happens, allowing for prompt action when there is the political will to stop it, argues Stuart Pimm.

We present a flora and fauna dataset for the Mira-Mataje binational basins. This is an area shared between southwestern Colombia and northwestern Ecuador, where both the Chocó and Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspots converge. We systematized data from 120 sources in the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) standard and geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems (GIS) (shapefiles). Sources included natural history museums, published literature, and citizen science repositories across 13 countries. The resulting database has 33,460 records from 6,821 species, of which 540 have been recorded as endemic, and 612 as threatened. The diversity represented in the dataset is equivalent to 10% of the total plant species and 26% of the total terrestrial vertebrate species in both hotspots. The dataset can be used to estimate and compare biodiversity patterns with environmental parameters and provide value to ecosystems, ecoregions, and protected areas. The dataset is a baseline for future assessments of biodiversity in the face of environmental degradation, climate change, and accelerated extinction processes.

In the wet season of southern Africa's savannahs, surface water is extensive, allowing elephants to move widely. However, when surface water is restricted in the dry season, elephant use of the landscape is highly dependent on water availability and varies across the southern African region due to an aridity/rainfall gradient and different levels of supplementary provisioning of water. Movement analyses of elephants in the Kruger National Park (KNP), where water sources are mapped in detail, revealed that elephants make high turn angles at water sources; that is, they at least partially retrace the route taken to the water source. This insight allows us to posit water sources in other places where water sources are not adequately mapped and to ask whether elephant movements indicate that they find water easily (while roaming), or whether they must change direction to encounter water. Put simply, is water a waypoint or the destination? Using high-resolution satellite imagery, and data for 101 collared elephants in six reserves, we studied a west to east rainfall gradient from Namibia to South Africa. We used a quasi-experimental approach to compare protected areas along the rainfall gradient with highly supplemented water against areas with little or no water supplementation. Three patterns emerged from the analysis of the movement data. First, along rivers, where one might have expected widespread, ready access to water, there are particular, favoured destinations, suggesting that elephants use some places along rivers more than others, or that accessible water is not widely available. Second, along apparently dry riverbeds, elephants were able to access water. Finally, movement data uncovered water sources away from rivers where GIS layers on water availability are unavailable or incomplete. Our results further indicate that some protected areas have so many artificial water holes that they become waypoints — places that do not require unusual deviations from their roaming directions, allowing elephants to access food across wide areas during both wet and dry seasons. Where accessible water sources are few, elephant use is localised and intense, impacting surrounding vegetation.

Protected areas conserve biodiversity and ecosystem functions but might impede local economic growth. Understanding the global patterns and predictors of different relationships between protected area effectiveness and neighboring community economic growth can inform better implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We assessed 10,143 protected areas globally with matched samples to address the non-random location of protected areas. Our results show that protected areas resist human-induced land cover changes and do not limit nightlight increases in neighboring settlements. This result is robust, using different matching techniques, parameter settings, and selection of covariates. We identify four types of relationships between land cover changes and nightlight changes for each protected area: "synergy," "retreat," and two tradeoff relationships. About half of the protected areas (47.5%) retain their natural land cover and do so despite an increase of nightlights in the neighboring communities. This synergy relationship is the most common globally but varies between biomes and continents. Synergy is less frequent in the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and some developing areas, where most biodiversity resides and which suffer more from poverty. Smaller protected areas and those with better access to cities, moderate road density, and better baseline economic conditions have a higher probability of reaching synergy. Our results are promising, as the expansion of protected areas and increased species protection will rely more on conserving the human-modified landscape with smaller protected areas. Future interventions should address local development and biodiversity conservation together to achieve more co-benefits.

The ongoing destruction of habitats in the tropics accelerates the current rate of species extinction. Range-restricted species are exceptionally vulnerable, yet we have insufficient knowledge about their protection. Species’ current distributions, range sizes, and protection gaps are crucial to determining conservation priorities. Here, we identified priority range-restricted bird species and their conservation hotspots in the Northern Andes. We employed maps of the Area of Habitat (AOH), that better reflect their current distributions than existing maps. AOH provides unprecedented resolution and maps a species in the detail essential for practical conservation actions. We estimated protection within each species’ AOH and for the cumulative distribution of all 335 forest-dependent range-restricted birds across the Northern Andes. For the latter, we also calculated protection across the elevational gradient. We estimated how much additional protection community lands (Indigenous and Afro-Latin American lands) would contribute if they were conservation-focused. AOHs ranged from 8 to 141,000 km2. We identified four conservation priorities based on cumulative species richness: the number of AOHs stacked per unit area. These priorities are high-resolution mapped representations of Endemic Bird Areas for the Tropical Andes that we consider critically important. Protected areas cover only 31% of the cumulative AOH, but community lands could add 19% more protection. Sixty-two per cent of the 335 species have ranges smaller than their published estimates, yet IUCN designates only 23% of these as Threatened. We identified 50 species as top conservation priorities. Most of these concentrate in areas of low protection near community lands and at middle elevations where, on average, only 34% of the land is protected. We highlight the importance of collaborative efforts among stakeholders: governments should support private and community-based conservation practices to protect the region with the most range-restricted birds worldwide.

Experience tells us how to maximize debt-for-nature effectiveness

The influence of protected areas on the growth of African savannah elephant populations is inadequately known. Across southern Africa, elephant numbers grew at 0.16% annually for the past quarter century. Locally, much depends on metapopulation dynamics-the size and connections of individual populations. Population numbers in large, connected, and strictly protected areas typically increased, were less variable from year to year, and suffered less from poaching. Conversely, populations in buffer areas that are less protected but still connected have more variation in growth from year to year. Buffer areas also differed more in their growth rates, likely due to more threats and dispersal opportunities in the face of such dangers. Isolated populations showed consistently high growth due to a lack of emigration. This suggests that "fortress" conservation generally maintains high growth, while anthropogenic-driven source-sink dynamics within connected conservation clusters drive stability in core areas and variability in buffers.

Experience tells us how to maximize debt-for-nature effectiveness

We consider the distribution of fruit pigeons of the genera Ptilinopus and Ducula on the island of New Guinea. Of the 21 species, between six and eight coexist inside humid lowland forests. We conducted or analyzed 31 surveys at 16 different sites, resurveying some sites in different years. The species coexisting at any single site in a single year are a highly nonrandom selection of the species to which that site is geographically accessible. Their sizes are both much more widely spread and more uniformly spaced than in random sets of species drawn from the locally available species pool. We also present a detailed case study of a highly mobile species that has been recorded on every ornithologically explored island in the West Papuan island group west of New Guinea. That species' rareness on just three well-surveyed islands within the group cannot be due to an inability to reach them. Instead, its local status decreases from abundant resident to rare vagrant in parallel with increasing weight proximity of the other resident species.

Loss of habitat can take many forms, ranging from the fragmentation of once-continuous habitat to the slow erosion of populations across continents. Usually, the harm leading to biodiversity loss is not immediately obvious: there is an extinction debt. Most modelling research of extinction debt has focussed on relatively rapid losses of habitat with species loss happening in response afterwards. In this paper, using a niche-orientated community model we compare and contrast two different mechanisms and find contrasting patterns of extinction debt. From small fragments, we typically see the rapid initial loss of many species, followed by a slower loss of species on larger timescales. When we consider slow incremental declines of population sizes, we find initially a slow rate of extinction which subsequently increases exponentially. In such cases, the delayed extinctions may go undetected initially both because the extinctions may be small relative to background randomness and because rate itself is not constant and takes time to reach its maximum.

Local studies show upslope shifts in the distribution of tropical birds in response to warming temperatures. Unanswered is whether these upward shifts occur regionally across many species. We considered a nearly 2000-km length of the Northern Andes, where deforestation, temperature, and extreme weather events have increased during the past decades. Range-restricted bird species are particularly vulnerable to such events and occur in exceptionally high numbers in this region. Using abundant crowd-sourced data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology database, eBird, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, we documented distributions of nearly 200 such species. We examined whether species shifted their elevational ranges over time by comparing observed versus expected occurrences below a low elevational threshold and above a high elevational threshold for 2 periods: before and after 2005. We predicted fewer observations at lower elevations (those below the threshold) and more at upper elevations (those above the threshold) after 2005. We also tested for deforestation effects at lower elevations within each species' distribution ranges. We compared relative forest loss with the differences between observed and expected occurrences across the elevational range. Species' retreats from lower elevations were ubiquitous and involved a 23-40% decline in prevalence at the lowest elevations. Increases at higher elevations were not consistent. The retreats occurred across a broad spectrum of species, from predominantly lowland to predominantly highland. Because deforestation showed no relationship with species retreats, we contend that a warming climate is the most parsimonious explanation for such shifts.

In closing the COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity in late 2022,Huang Runqiu,China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment and COP15 president,celebrated the agreement to protect≥30% of the world by 2030.Recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories,where applicable,he said the agreement marked a’historic moment’in global efforts to save nature,calling the deal’a package we can all be proud of’ [1].

Major centres of global food export are not in places where biodiversity is greatest.

Stuart Pimm remembers ecologist and conservationist Tom Lovejoy, who coined the term biodiversity.

As you know, we're interested in issues of representation (in a broad sense of the term) as they relate to extinction. 1 To begin, could you tell us a little about the ways you employ images and/or imaging techniques in your own work?Stuart Pimm: Th ere are two sides to this; on one I use a huge number of remote sensing maps and visualizations, on the other I also use pictures of gloriously charismatic animals.So where do you want to go with that?NC: Do you fi nd that you ever combine both?Do you think that you use them for diff erent reasons?SP: Yes, absolutely.One of the things that I try to instil in the classes I teach is that these days we face the challenge of those who violate science, violate facts, violate common sense, and do so for a catchy soundbite.We have to be cognizant of all this, and we have to recognize that we need to be compelling communicators of what we do.And then the challenge becomes how to intersect good communication with good science.You want to make sure the science is good, and it's credible, and it's justifi ed.But it also has to be something that people can quickly understand.I do think that's a challenge, and I think good imagery can be very important in that context.If there's one thing that's certain, it is that a diffi cult graph or

The lives lost and economic costs of viral zoonotic pandemics have steadily increased over the past century. Prominent policymakers have promoted plans that argue the best ways to address future pandemic catastrophes should entail, “detecting and containing emerging zoonotic threats.” In other words, we should take actions only after humans get sick. We sharply disagree. Humans have extensive contact with wildlife known to harbor vast numbers of viruses, many of which have not yet spilled into humans. We compute the annualized damages from emerging viral zoonoses. We explore three practical actions to minimize the impact of future pandemics: better surveillance of pathogen spillover and development of global databases of virus genomics and serology, better management of wildlife trade, and substantial reduction of deforestation. We find that these primary pandemic prevention actions cost less than 1/20th the value of lives lost each year to emerging viral zoonoses and have substantial cobenefits.

On the second day of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), 130 nations announced a decision to halt global deforestation by 2030 (1). This is a welcome move and a political success, but ecologically it falls short. The plan needs to be expanded to include savannas, which cover an area of 20 million km2—more than the 17 million km2 covered by tropical forests (2)—and are potentially more important carbon sinks than forests.