Conference Agenda

Biodiversity underpins ecosystem services essential to human well-being, yet it is declining at unprecedented rates worldwide. Agri-environmental policies are a central tool for halting these losses, but systematic evidence on which measures effectively conserve biodiversity remains scarce, particularly at the global scale. This paper addresses this evaluation gap by providing a large-scale, cross-country assessment of the effectiveness of agri-environmental policy. We develop a conceptual framework linking policy instruments and targets to biodiversity outcomes and apply it to classify over 200,000 policy documents using large language models. This results in a novel, comprehensive, global database of over 14,000 agri-environmental policy measures implemented between 1988 and 2022. The policy data reveal how policymakers design biodiversity-related interventions and which conservation targets they prioritize. To identify effective policies, we use a machine learning-based extension of difference-in-differences approach and measure biodiversity outcomes using the Biodiversity Intactness Index for more than 170 countries. Our preliminary results identify 38 cases of significant biodiversity improvements across diverse biomes, associated with policy mixes aiming to improve species richness and ecosystem integrity and protect genetic diversity. These findings provide actionable insights for policymakers seeking to design agri-environmental policies that deliver measurable biodiversity gains.