Biodiversity Loss Projections Under Combined Land-Use and Climate Change Scenarios
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22802537Keywords:
biodiversity loss, species distribution modelling, land-use change, climate change, extinction risk, range contraction, shared socioeconomic pathways, interacting stressors, community composition, habitat fragmentationAbstract
Land-use change and climate change are the two most consistently identified direct drivers of terrestrial biodiversity
decline, yet the large majority of projection studies published before the mid-2010s modelled them separately,
leaving the magnitude of their combined effect poorly constrained. We synthesise findings from 118 peer-reviewed
studies published between 2007 and 2023 that projected future biodiversity loss, extinction risk, or community
composition change under scenarios combining land-use and climate forcing, spanning species distribution
modelling of individual taxa, macroecological analyses of species richness, and integrated assessment approaches
linking shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) land-use trajectories to representative concentration pathway (RCP)
climate forcing. Across this literature, combined land-use and climate change scenarios consistently project greater
range contraction and extinction risk than either driver modelled alone, with a median excess loss attributable to the
interaction of roughly 8-15 percentage points of range area across taxonomic groups, though the interaction is
reported as synergistic, additive, or occasionally antagonistic depending on taxon, region, and dispersal
assumptions. Amphibians and range-restricted tropical taxa consistently show the largest projected combined
losses, while dispersal-limited species in fragmented agricultural landscapes are disproportionately unable to track
shifting climate envelopes even where climatically suitable habitat persists elsewhere. High-emission,
land-conversion-intensive scenario combinations (broadly corresponding to SSP3-RCP7.0 and SSP5-RCP8.5)
project substantially larger biodiversity losses than mitigation-consistent pathways (SSP1-RCP2.6), with the gap
between scenario families widening over the course of the twenty-first century. We identify persistent
methodological gaps, including inconsistent treatment of dispersal ability, land-use land-cover harmonisation across
scenario products, biotic interactions, and evolutionary adaptive capacity, that limit confidence in precise loss
estimates while leaving the qualitative conclusion, that the two drivers interact to accelerate biodiversity loss beyond
what either produces alone, well supported. We conclude by outlining priorities for narrowing uncertainty in
combined-driver biodiversity projections.
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