Ecology: a global plan for nature conservation
Climate change and biodiversity loss are the two greatest environmental challenges of our time. The 2015 Paris climate agreement states that global warming must be limited to a rise in temperature of less than 2 oC above pre-industrial levels to avoid the greatest impacts of climate change1. This goal has served as a rallying point for global efforts to limit carbon emissions. However, a comparably clear, agreed target for the amount of natural space that should be conserved to address the biodiversity crisis has been much more elusive. Writing in BioScience, Dinerstein et al. 2 analyse the current level of ecosystem protection on a global scale, and propose a way to address the problem of biodiversity loss.