10 anniversary publications – Ten years of Basque Centre for Climate Change

October 3, 2018

BC3 Article: Honeybee spillover reshuffles pollinator diets and affects plant reproductive success

During the past decades, managed honeybee stocks have increased globally. Managed honeybees are particularly used within mass-flowering crops and often spill over to adjacent natural habitats after crop blooming. Here, we uniquely show the simultaneous impact that honeybee spillover has on wild plant and animal communities in flower-rich woodlands via changes in plant–pollinator network structure that translate into a direct negative effect on the reproductive success of a dominant wild plant.

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Journal Article: Social-ecological outcomes of agricultural intensification

Vang Rasmussen L., Coolsaet B., Martin A., Mertz O., Pascual U., Corbera E., Dawson N., Fisher J.A., Franks P., Ryan C.M. Social-ecological outcomes of agricultural intensification. Nature sustainability. 1, 275–282. DOI (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0070-8) Abstract Land-use intensification in agrarian landscapes is seen as a key strategy to simultaneously feed humanity and use ecosystems sustainably, but the conditions that […]

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Article: From principles to practice in paying for nature’s services

S. Wunder, R. Brouwer, S. Engel, D. Ezzine-de-Blas, R. Muradian, U. Pascual & R. Pinto. From principles to practice in paying for nature’s services. 2018 Nature sustainability. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0036-x Abstract Payments for Environmental Services (PES) constitute an innovative economic intervention to counteract the global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. In theory, some appealing features should […]

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Article: Assessing nature’s contributions to people

A major challenge today and into the future is to maintain or enhance beneficial contributions of nature to a good quality of life for all people. This is among the key motivations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a joint global effort by governments, academia, and civil society to assess and promote knowledge of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystems and their contribution to human societies in order to inform policy formulation.

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Article: Anthropogenic ecosystem disturbance and the recovery debt

Ecosystem recovery from anthropogenic disturbances, either without human intervention or assisted by ecological restoration, is increasingly occurring worldwide. As ecosystems progress through recovery, it is important to estimate any resulting deficit in biodiversity and functions. Here we use data from 3,035 sampling plots worldwide, to quantify the interim reduction of biodiversity and functions occurring during the recovery process (that is, the ‘recovery debt’). Compared with reference levels, recovering ecosystems run annual deficits of 46–51% for organism abundance, 27–33% for species diversity, 32–42% for carbon cycling and 31–41% for nitrogen cycling.

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Journal Article: From principles to practice in paying for nature’s services

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) constitute an innovative economic intervention to counteract the global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. In theory, some appealing features should enable PES to perform well in achieving conservation and welfare goals. In practice, outcomes depend on the interplay between context, design and implementation. Inspecting a new global dataset, we find that some PES design principles pre-identified in the social-science literature as desirable, such as spatial targeting and payment differentiation, are only partially being applied in practice.

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications

October 3, 2018

BC3 Journal article: Reconciling global-model estimates and country reporting of anthropogenic forest CO2 sinks

Achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement requires forest-based mitigation. Collective progress towards this goal will be assessed by the Paris Agreement’s Global stocktake. At present, there is a discrepancy of about 4 GtCO2 yr−1 in global anthropogenic net land-use emissions between global models (reflected in IPCC assessment reports) and aggregated national GHG inventories (under the UNFCCC). We show that a substantial part of this discrepancy (about 3.2 GtCO2 yr−1) can be explained by conceptual differences in anthropogenic forest sink estimation, related to the representation of environmental change impacts and the areas considered as managed.

BC3Research 10 anniversary publications