Why European biodiversity reporting is not reliable
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Why European biodiversity reporting is not reliable Jana-Sophie Ette
, Thomas Geburek
Received: 22 June 2020 / Revised: 6 October 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020
Abstract The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to end the loss of biodiversity, which is one of the greatest ecological challenges of our time. The lack of success in biodiversity policy implementation is partly related to gaps in biodiversity monitoring. Our overall objective is to contribute to the preparation of the upcoming post 2020 period by a review of biodiversity indicator choices in European CBD reports and hence in national monitoring systems. Negative binary generalized models and poisson generalized linear models prove that through free indicator choice in CBD reporting, countries do not choose biodiversity indicators according to their national geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Moreover, species and ecosystem diversity indicators were chosen with a disproportionate frequency compared to that of genetic diversity indicators. Consequently, trends derived from national CBD reports and monitoring systems in Europe are not reliable, which should be an alarming signal concerning biodiversity policy implementation. Finally, a flow chart to revise national biodiversity monitoring systems is proposed. Keywords Biodiversity indicators Biodiversity monitoring Biodiversity policy implementation European species diversity
INTRODUCTION With global extinction rates being one hundred to one thousand times greater than the natural baseline (Ceballos Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01415-8 contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
et al. 2010 and 2015), the loss of biodiversity is one of the greatest and most serious ecological challenges of our time (CBD 2006; Rockstro¨m et al. 2009). Biodiversity loss threatens the provision of ecosystem services at an accelerating rate and erodes the foundation of humanity (IPBES 2019). Nonetheless, the main drivers of extinction are of anthropogenic origin (Sala et al. 2000; Newbold et al. 2015). Convention on biological diversity Therefore, two hundred countries committed themselves to halt the loss of biodiversity by signing the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992. Thus, 14.4 billion USD was spent globally from 1992 to 2003 to slow down biodiversity loss. This effort reduced the expected species decline in that period by 29% (Waldron et al. 2017). Nonetheless, strategic CBD targets were not achieved until 2010 (CBD 2014), and Aichi targets for the successive period 2011 to 2020 will not be accomplished (CBD 2014; Tittensor et al. 2014). Why do the member countries fail to reach the targets even though numerous financial efforts have been made? Actually, there is no internal mechanism in the CBD body established to monitor national-level compliance and the implementation of biodiversity policies (Morgera and Tsioumami 2011; Vordermayer-Riemer 2019). Therefo
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