Loss of biological control
How Resilience prices the loss of the natural enemies that keep crop pests and diseases in check.
Loss of biological control
Predators, parasites and diverse habitats keep pests and diseases down around fields and forests. When they decline, a site has to defend the same yield with more pesticide, or lose part of it. Resilience books that loss as a Business interruption loss, against revenue only.
What the map shows
Biological control has no layer of its own. It is read through the natural assets ENCORE links to it, with the same delivery weight in every biome:
- Today: Species, weight 1: MSA Degradation (2015). Habitats, weight 0.5: Natural habitat % — baseline 2024 (LUH3), a layer hidden from the map pickers and shown under Today.
- Projected: Species: MSA Shock layers for SSP1 and SSP3. Habitats: LUH3 Shock layers, trajectory M for SSP1 and H for SSP3. Both at 2035, 2050 and 2080. SSP2-4.5 reads the SSP3 layers.
At each site the service takes the most degraded supplier, after its delivery weight.
How the loss is computed
The degradation D, between 0 and 1, is the largest of (delivery weight × degradation of the natural asset) at the site. The dependency is the ENCORE rating of the site's activity, read as (rating − 1) / 4. No replacement cost is published for this service yet, so the loss is D × dependency × revenue. See Nature risks and Shock layers.
Until 2026-09-30, this risk read the GLOBIO-ES pest-control layers directly. They stay on the map for reference: see the Pest control shock sheet for why they were retired.
Sources
- GLOBIO 4 (PBL), Schipper et al. (2020): Mean Species Abundance. CC BY 4.0.
- Land-Use Harmonization 3 (LUH3), University of Maryland, CMIP7 (Zenodo / input4MIPs); HYDE 3.4 land-use reconstruction. LUH3: CC BY 4.0. HYDE 3.4: Licence not confirmed (CC BY 4.0 reported).
- ENCORE 2024 (Global Canopy, UNEP FI, UNEP-WCMC): delivery weights and dependency ratings. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Limits
- No global, scenario-based source of biological control exists. The components stand in for it, and the two readings were not cross-checked.
- LUH3 runs one model per trajectory (M is IMAGE, H is GCAM), so part of the gap between scenarios is a model gap. Trajectory M is current policies, not Paris-compatible.
- MSA never reads intact: GLOBIO's climate pressure puts the least disturbed land at about 8 % degradation.