Collaboration across boundaries in the Amazon

Global assessment of nature's contributions to people

Synergistically maintain or enhance the numerous beneficial contributions of nature to the quality of human life is an important but challenging question for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. However, the spatiotemporal distributions of global nature's contributions to people (NCPs) and their interactions remain unclear. We built a rapid assessment indicator framework and produced the first spatially explicit assessment of all 18 NCPs at a global scale. The 18 global NCPs in 1992 and 2018 were globally assessed in 15,204 subbasins based on two spatial indicator dimensions, including nature's potential contribution and the actual contribution to people. The results show that most of the high NCP values are highly localized. From 1992 to 2018, 6 regulating NCPs, 3 material NCPs, and 2 nonmaterial NCPs declined; 29 regulating-material NCP combinations (54 in total) dominated 76% of the terrestrial area, and the area with few NCPs accounted for 22%; and synergistic relationships were more common than tradeoff relationships, while the relationships among regulating and material NCPs generally traded-off with each other. Transitional climate areas contained few NCPs and have strong tradeoff relationships. However, the high synergistic relationship among NCPs in low latitudes could be threatened by future climate change. These findings provide a general spatiotemporal understanding of global NCP distributions and can be used to interpret the biogeographic information in a functional way to support regional coordination and achieve landscape multifunctionality for the enhancement of human well-being.

Reducing adverse impacts of Amazon hydropower expansion

Proposed hydropower dams at more than 350 sites throughout the Amazon require strategic evaluation of trade-offs between the numerous ecosystem services provided by Earth's largest and most biodiverse river basin. These services are spatially variable, hence collective impacts of newly built dams depend strongly on their configuration. We use multiobjective optimization to identify portfolios of sites that simultaneously minimize impacts on river flow, river connectivity, sediment transport, fish diversity, and greenhouse gas emissions while achieving energy production goals. We find that uncoordinated, dam-by-dam hydropower expansion has resulted in forgone ecosystem service benefits. Minimizing further damage from hydropower development requires considering diverse environmental impacts across the entire basin, as well as cooperation among Amazonian nations. Our findings offer a transferable model for the evaluation of hydropower expansion in transboundary basins.

The COVID-19 pandemic is intricately linked to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused by zoonotic SARS-CoV-2, has important links to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health. These links range from anthropogenic activities driving zoonotic disease emergence and extend to the pandemic affecting biodiversity conservation, environmental policy, ecosystem services, and multiple conservation facets. Crucially, such effects can exacerbate the initial drivers, resulting in feedback loops that are likely to promote future zoonotic disease outbreaks. We explore these feedback loops and relationships, highlighting known and potential zoonotic disease emergence drivers (eg, land-use change, intensive livestock production, wildlife trade, and climate change), and discuss direct and indirect effects of the ongoing pandemic on biodiversity loss and ecosystem health. We stress that responses to COVID-19 must include actions aimed at safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems, in order to avoid future emergence of zoonoses and prevent their wide-ranging effects on human health, economies, and society. Such responses would benefit from adopting a One Health approach, enhancing cross-sector, transboundary communication, as well as from collaboration among multiple actors, promoting planetary and human health.