Conference Agenda

Climate change and the ongoing homogenisation of agricultural landscapes pose major threats to biodiversity. Increasing climatic variability complicates the alignment of land-use schedules (e.g., mowing regimes) with the species’ life cycles (e.g., reproduction period of meadow birds), while landscape homogenisation reduces the diversity of living conditions for species. Adaptive and spatially differentiated policies are increasingly discussed to address these challenges. We develop a generic model of a grassland that is used for hay production and is habitat of a number of meadow birds. Three strategies are compared with respect to their efficiency, measured by the sum of an economic benefit and a weighted biodiversity benefit. The strategies differ by their adaptability and by their specificity with respect to the species’ life cycles. Flexibility is shown to pay off only if the climatic variation is large compared to the measurement error that occurs in the prediction of the current year’s ecological and economic effects of the different mowing regimes. An increasing level of the regulator’s risk aversion or a decreasing weight on biodiversity, in contrast, favour the species-unspecific strategy which uses no ecological or economic information at all. Noting that our analysis ignores the cost of information acquisition, implementation costs and other transaction costs, we conclude that higher levels of complexity and target accuracy do not always reflect in a more efficient conservation of biodiversity. Instead, the different pros and cons of different strategies need to be weighted carefully in the light of the present conservation problem.

While shifting ecological and land use dynamics have been shown to affect restoration

targeting decisions, the impact of changing climatic conditions on economic value

remains less explored. Climate change can be expected to affect both the benefits and

costs of a particular restoration project, through changing crop yields, shifting

vegetation, and urbanization, among other factors, potentially leading to abandonment

of sites or forgone opportunity. Here, we first present a framework for understanding

the effect of projected social and ecological changes on potential economic value of a

restoration project. We then apply the model to an empirical context of interest: habitat-

focused forest planting in Brazil, focusing on the implications of two specific climate

change projections: changing crop yields and changing forest cover habitat. We find

that active restoration could yield a positive return in a majority of grid cells across the

country, monetizing benefits of restored lands by considering habitat value alone, yet

that integrating projections of conditions in 2050 yields greater expected benefits than

present conditions would suggest, with an increase of 41 percent in the median tract

and significant spatial variation. Our results illustrate the importance of accounting for

projected changes in conditions in restoration planning and find support for the

economic value of wide-scale restoration programs which provide biodiversity

protection.

Can historical industries leave unexpectedly protective environmental legacies? This paper examines the long-term effects of pre-industrial metallurgical activity on forest conservation in Belgium. Using newly assembled spatially geolocated data on eighteenth-century forges combined with contemporary high-resolution forest records, we model the historical determinants of forge placement and estimate their persistent impact on land use. Instrumented forge presence significantly increases the likelihood of old-growth forest today—by roughly 25 percentage points—while reducing the probability of recent afforestation by more than 50 percentage points. These results suggest that charcoal-dependent industries, by relying on stable and highly localized forest inputs, unintentionally preserved forest cover and dampened later conversion pressures, even long after the transition to coal. More broadly, the findings illustrate how resource-dependent production systems can generate durable path dependencies that shape environmental landscapes over centuries.

We map and quantify biodiversity impacts and ecosystem service (ES) dependencies associated with global equity ownership. By integrating firm-level financial ownership data (Orbis), multi-regional input-output analysis (GLORIA), and life-cycle assessment (LC-IMPACT), we link shareholder portfolios to spatially explicit measures of land-use-driven biodiversity impact and ES dependencies. Our dataset covers listed companies representing USD 121.7 trillion in market capitalization (≈96% of global market capitalization) and ~336,000 ultimate shareholders holding USD 54.1 trillion in equity. Shareholders' biodiversity footprints are highly concentrated in Latin America and Asia, and the ownership of impactful activities is mostly regional. However, shareholders in North America and Western Europe account for a disproportionate share of ownership in impactful activities beyond their own region. ES in China, and to a lesser extent the United States, are critical for both regional and extra-regional investors. Portfolio-level geographical overlap between impacts and dependencies typically remains below 40% suggesting that risk-based incentives alone may be insufficient to align financial flows with biodiversity outcomes.