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Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global account of the impending biodiversity loss caused by current land-use patterns, explicitly addressing the role of land-use intensity based on two sets of intensity indicators. We find that land-use entails the loss of ~15% of terrestrial vertebrate species from the average 5 × 5 arcmin-landscape outside remaining wilderness areas and ~14% of their average native area-of-habitat, with a risk of global extinction for 556 individual species. Given the large fraction of global land currently used under low land-use intensity, we find its contribution to biodiversity loss to be substantial (~25%). While both sets of intensity indicators yield similar global average results, we find regional differences between them and discuss data gaps. Our results support calls for improved sustainable intensification strategies and demand-side actions to reduce trade-offs between food security and biodiversity conservation. Land use is a major driver of biodiversity loss, but disentangling the contribution of its various components is challenging. Here, the authors partition the role of land use type and intensity in explaining global patterns of impending species losses for terrestrial vertebrates.

Human-made material stocks accumulating in buildings, infrastructure, and machinery play a crucial but underappreciated role in shaping the use of material and energy resources. Building, maintaining, and in particular operating in-use stocks of materials require raw materials and energy. Material stocks create long-term path-dependencies because of their longevity. Fostering a transition toward environmentally sustainable patterns of resource use requires a more complete understanding of stock-flow relations. Here we show that about half of all materials extracted globally by humans each year are used to build up or renew in-use stocks of materials. Based on a dynamic stock-flow model, we analyze stocks, inflows, and outflows of all materials and their relation to economic growth, energy use, and CO₂ emissions from 1900 to 2010. Over this period, global material stocks increased 23-fold, reaching 792 Pg (±5%) in 2010. Despite efforts to improve recycling rates, continuous stock growth precludes closing material loops; recycling still only contributes 12% of inflows to stocks. Stocks are likely to continue to grow, driven by large infrastructure and building requirements in emerging economies. A convergence of material stocks at the level of industrial countries would lead to a fourfold increase in global stocks, and CO₂ emissions exceeding climate change goals. Reducing expected future increases of material and energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions will require decoupling of services from the stocks and flows of materials through, for example, more intensive utilization of existing stocks, longer service lifetimes, and more efficient design.

Strategies toward ambitious climate targets usually rely on the concept of 'decoupling'; that is, they aim at promoting economic growth while reducing the use of natural resources and GHG emissions. GDP growth coinciding with absolute reductions in emissions or resource use is denoted as 'absolute decoupling', as opposed to 'relative decoupling', where resource use or emissions increase less so than does GDP. Based on the bibliometric mapping in part I (Wiedenhofer et al, 2020 Environ. Res. Lett. 15 063002), we synthesize the evidence emerging from the selected 835 peer-reviewed articles. We evaluate empirical studies of decoupling related to final/useful energy, exergy, use of material resources, as well as CO2 and total GHG emissions. We find that relative decoupling is frequent for material use as well as GHG and CO2 emissions but not for useful exergy, a quality-based measure of energy use. Primary energy can be decoupled from GDP largely to the extent to which the conversion of primary energy to useful exergy is improved. Examples of absolute long-term decoupling are rare, but recently some industrialized countries have decoupled GDP from both production- and, weaklier, consumption-based CO2 emissions. We analyze policies or strategies in the decoupling literature by classifying them into three groups: (1) Green growth, if sufficient reductions of resource use or emissions were deemed possible without altering the growth trajectory. (2) Degrowth, if reductions of resource use or emissions were given priority over GDP growth. (3) Others, e.g. if the role of energy for GDP growth was analyzed without reference to climate change mitigation. We conclude that large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates, hence decoupling needs to be complemented by sufficiency-oriented strategies and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets. More research is needed on interdependencies between wellbeing, resources and emissions.

Global increases in population, consumption, and gross domestic product raise concerns about the sustainability of the current and future use of natural resources. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) provides a useful measure of human intervention into the biosphere. The productive capacity of land is appropriated by harvesting or burning biomass and by converting natural ecosystems to managed lands with lower productivity. This work analyzes trends in HANPP from 1910 to 2005 and finds that although human population has grown fourfold and economic output 17-fold, global HANPP has only doubled. Despite this increase in efficiency, HANPP has still risen from 6.9 Gt of carbon per y in 1910 to 14.8 GtC/y in 2005, i.e., from 13% to 25% of the net primary production of potential vegetation. Biomass harvested per capita and year has slightly declined despite growth in consumption because of a decline in reliance on bioenergy and higher conversion efficiencies of primary biomass to products. The rise in efficiency is overwhelmingly due to increased crop yields, albeit frequently associated with substantial ecological costs, such as fossil energy inputs, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. If humans can maintain the past trend lines in efficiency gains, we estimate that HANPP might only grow to 27–29% by 2050, but providing large amounts of bioenergy could increase global HANPP to 44%. This result calls for caution in refocusing the energy economy on land-based resources and for strategies that foster the continuation of increases in land-use efficiency without excessively increasing ecological costs of intensification.

As long as economic growth is a major political goal, decoupling growth from resource use and emissions is a prerequisite for a sustainable net-zero emissions future. However, empirical evidence for absolute decoupling, i.e. decreasing resource use and emissions at the required scale despite continued economic growth, is scarce and scattered across different research streams. In this two-part systematic review, we assess how and to what extent decoupling has been observed and what can be learnt for addressing the sustainability and climate crisis. Based on a transparent approach, we systematically identify and screen more than 11 500 scientific papers, eventually analyzing full texts of 835 empirical studies on the relationship between economic growth (GDP), resource use (materials and energy) and greenhouse gas emissions. Part I of the review examines how decoupling has been investigated across three research streams: energy, materials and energy, and emissions. Part II synthesizes the empirical evidence and policy implications (Haberl et al 2020 Environ. Res. Lett. 15 065003). In part I, we examine the topical, temporal and geographical scopes, methods of analysis, institutional networks and prevalent conceptual angles. We find that in this rapidly growing literature, the vast majority of studies-decomposition, 'causality' and Environmental Kuznets Curve analysis-approach the topic from a statistical-econometric point of view, while hardly acknowledging thermodynamic principles on the role of energy and materials for socio-economic activities. A potentially fundamental incompatibility between economic growth and systemic societal changes to address the climate crisis is rarely considered. We conclude that the existing wealth of empirical evidence merits braver conceptual advances than we have seen thus far. Future work should focus on comprehensive multi-indicator long-term analyses, conceptually grounded on the fundamental biophysical basis of socio-economic activities, incorporating the role of global supply chains as well as the wider societal role and preconditions of economic growth.

Economic development and growth depend on growing levels of resource use, and result in environmental impacts from large scale resource extraction and emissions of waste. In this study, we examine the resource dependency of economic activities over the past several decades for a set of countries comprising developing, emerging and mature industrialized economies. Rather than a single universal industrial development pathway, we find a diversity of economic dependencies on material use, made evident through cluster analysis. We conduct tests for relative and absolute decoupling of the economy from material use, and compare these with similar tests for decoupling from carbon emissions, both for single countries and country groupings using panel analysis. We show that, over the longer term, emerging and developing countries tend to have significantly larger material-economic coupling than mature industrialized economies (although this effect may be enhanced by trade patterns), but that the contrary is true for short-term coupling. Moreover, we demonstrate that absolute dematerialization limits economic growth rates, while the successful industrialization of developing countries inevitably requires a strong material component. Alternative development priorities are thus urgently needed both for mature and emerging economies: reducing absolute consumption levels for the former, and avoiding the trap of resource-intensive economic and human development for the latter.

Fundamental changes in the societal use of biophysical resources are required for a sustainability transformation. Current socioeconomic metabolism research traces flows of energy, materials or substances to capture resource use: input of raw materials or energy, their fate in production and consumption, and the discharge of wastes and emissions. This approach has yielded important insights into eco-efficiency and long-term drivers of resource use. But socio-metabolic research has not yet fully incorporated material stocks or their services, hence not completely exploiting the analytic power of the metabolism concept. This commentary argues for a material stock–flow–service nexus approach focused on the analysis of interrelations between material and energy flows, socioeconomic material stocks (“in-use stocks of materials”) and the services provided by specific stock/flow combinations. Analyzing the interrelations between stocks, flows and services will allow researchers to develop highly innovative indicators of eco-efficiency and open new research directions that will help to better understand biophysical foundations of transformations towards sustainability.

Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP), the aggregate impact of land use on biomass available each year in ecosystems, is a prominent measure of the human domination of the biosphere. We present a comprehensive assessment of global HANPP based on vegetation modeling, agricultural and forestry statistics, and geographical information systems data on land use, land cover, and soil degradation that localizes human impact on ecosystems. We found an aggregate global HANPP value of 15.6 Pg C/yr or 23.8% of potential net primary productivity, of which 53% was contributed by harvest, 40% by land-use-induced productivity changes, and 7% by human-induced fires. This is a remarkable impact on the biosphere caused by just one species. We present maps quantifying human-induced changes in trophic energy flows in ecosystems that illustrate spatial patterns in the human domination of ecosystems, thus emphasizing land use as a pervasive factor of global importance. Land use transforms earth's terrestrial surface, resulting in changes in biogeochemical cycles and in the ability of ecosystems to deliver services critical to human well being. The results suggest that large-scale schemes to substitute biomass for fossil fuels should be viewed cautiously because massive additional pressures on ecosystems might result from increased biomass harvest.

Globalization and economic growth are widely recognized as important drivers of biological invasions. Consequently, there is an increasing need for governments to address the role of international trade in their strategies to prevent species introductions. However, many of the most problematic alien species are not recent arrivals but were introduced several decades ago. Hence, current patterns of alien-species richness may better reflect historical rather than contemporary human activities, a phenomenon which might be called “invasion debt.” Here, we show that across 10 taxonomic groups (vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, terrestrial insects, and aquatic invertebrates) in 28 European countries, current numbers of alien species established in the wild are indeed more closely related to indicators of socioeconomic activity from the year 1900 than to those from 2000, although the majority of species introductions occurred during the second half of the 20th century. The strength of the historical signal varies among taxonomic groups, with those possessing good capabilities for dispersal (birds, insects) more strongly associated with recent socioeconomic drivers. Nevertheless, our results suggest a considerable historical legacy for the majority of the taxa analyzed. The consequences of the current high levels of socioeconomic activity on the extent of biological invasions will thus probably not be completely realized until several decades into the future.