Loss of biomass provisioning

Loss of biomass provisioning

Healthy ecosystems grow the plants, timber, fish and game that many activities harvest. When species and habitats decline, the same land or water yields less. Resilience books that loss as a Business interruption loss, against revenue only.

What the map shows

Biomass provisioning has no layer of its own. It is read through the natural assets ENCORE links to it:

• Today: Species, weight 1 (0.5 in subterranean ecosystems): MSA Degradation (2015). Habitats, weight 0.5 (0.25 in subterranean ecosystems): 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. The weight depends on the site's biome. A site spanning several biomes keeps the highest 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.

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

• 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.
• LUH3 natural habitat means the absence of human land use. Deserts score near the top.
• MSA never reads intact: GLOBIO's climate pressure puts the least disturbed land at about 8 % degradation.