Biodiversity impacts and conservation implications of urban land expansion projected to 2050

As the global urban population is poised to grow by 2.5 billion over the next 30 y, urban land conversions are expected to be an increasingly prominent driver of habitat and biodiversity loss. Mitigating these impacts urgently requires an improved understanding of where and how these biodiversity losses might occur. Here, we use a recently developed suite of land-use projections to provide an assessment of projected habitat that will be lost to urban land expansion for 30,393 species of terrestrial vertebrates from 2015 to 2050 across three shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios. We find that urban land expansion is a contributing driver of habitat loss (≥5% of total loss) for around one-third (26 to…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Award: DEB-1441737
• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  Awards: 80NSSC19K0638, 80NSSC18K0435, 80NSSC17K0282