Ranking threats to biodiversity and why it doesn't matter

Abstract

Conservation scientists have proposed several rankings of the relative importance of global threats to biodiversity. Here, we argue that relative ranking of biodiversity threats depends on local context and metrics used, and so has little application for conservation.

Fig. 1. Divergence of global threat rankings across different references and international agencies.

IPBES, WWF, and IUCN established global rankings of the five threats responsible for the current biodiversity crisis (B: central, yellow panel). However, the relative importance of each threat depends on the taxon, system, species’ characteristics, time, and/or the metric considered, resulting in divergences. Global biodiversity threats are represented by colors and symbols, given in the top panel. This figure encapsulates results combined from different studies detailed in Supplementary Table 1 with their associated references.