Countries across the world are reliant on a range of services that are based around their natural ecosystems. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BES) include such necessities as food provision, water security and regulation of air quality that are vital to maintaining the health and stability of communities and economies.

Recent major international reports have highlighted the alarming impact of food production systems on climate change, land and biodiversity.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat has released the zero draft of the global biodiversity framework.

This book presents current knowledge about ecosystem services (ES) in urban planning, and discusses various urban ES topics such as spatial distribution of urban ecosystems, population distribution, and physical infrastructure properties.

Agricultural expansion is the greatest driver of the loss of nature and its biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide. In Africa, this is primarily the expansion of food crops to meet growth in domestic food demand. Further losses are inevitable before the situation stabilises.

Boosting agricultural production to meet the food demands of growing and more prosperous populations increasingly comes with a cost to the ecosystems upon which human life more broadly depends. Yet many developing countries (and some developed countries) do not acknowledge or understand these trade-offs.

The Climate, Nature and our 1.5°C Future report brings together the findings of four recent authoritative reports on climate change and biodiversity from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The recent Global Assessment released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) supplied clear indicators of the loss of nature and the decline of ecosystem services—valued in the hundreds of trillions of dollars—which provide the basic building blocks of the global economy, from water to ene