Pest control shock (biological control)

Source: GLOBIO-ES (EBV cube) Year: 2015 baseline → 2035 / 2050 / 2080 Category: Scenario · Ecosystem service (ES-direct, Tier-2) Coverage: Global Format: Raster grid (COG) Used in risk analysis: Yes — supplies the Biological control service shock in the Nature Stress Test; not used in present-day materiality scoring.

What it shows

This layer family projects how the capacity of the surrounding landscape to suppress crop pests naturally — through the predators and parasitoids that live in semi-natural habitat near farmland — is expected to change under climate-and-land-use scenarios, relative to a 2015 baseline. Where this capacity falls, the same yield has to be defended with more chemical input.

It is an ES-direct (Tier-2) layer: it carries an ecosystem service shock, not an ecosystem component shock. When it resolves for the requested scenario and horizon, the Nature Stress Test reads the Biological control degradation straight from the layer and bypasses the ENCORE projection from natural assets.

Note the naming: the layer is called Pest control, and the ENCORE ecosystem service it feeds is Biological control. They are the same thing — the service name is what appears in the stress-test explorer.

How it is built

GLOBIO-ES derives natural pest-control capacity from the availability of semi-natural habitat around cropland in the EBV cube. The shock is the relative change in that capacity (%) versus the 2015 baseline, with negative = service loss.

Horizon provenance — read this before using 2035 or 2080. GLOBIO-ES supplies a single future slice, at 2050. The 2035 and 2080 layers are linearly scaled off the 2015 baseline — the 2050 shock multiplied by (horizon − 2015) / 35 and clamped to range — so they assume a constant rate of degradation and carry no independent model information. Read them as a trajectory, not as a projection.

Scenario forcing. The pessimistic member is driven by SSP3-RCP6.0, the forcing GLOBIO-ES publishes for the regional-rivalry pathway, whereas the natural-asset layers use SSP3-RCP7.0 and the application labels the scenario SSP3-7.0 throughout.

How to read it

Values are the projected change in natural pest-control capacity, in percent versus 2015. More negative = greater projected loss of biological control at that location. As with pollination, the signal only becomes financially material where crop production actually sits in the supply chain.

Class thresholds

The underlying quantity is a change-of-condition flux: relative change in natural crop-pest-control capacity, in % vs the 2015 baseline. Rendered as a continuous symlog diverging gradient, not discrete risk classes:

Proximity flag. A cell is flagged as a high Pest shock zone on the Enabling services dimension when the shock falls below −30 %. The −30 % break and the symmetric gradient endpoints are in-house choices, not published thresholds.

Source

GLOBIO-ES (PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) — ecosystem-service extension of the GLOBIO model, distributed as an EBV cube.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This is a forward-looking, horizon-resolved scenario layer and has no equivalent in the WWF Risk Filter Suite, which publishes present-day indicators only. Treat it as a Darwin extension.

Legend

Symbolised field: Biological control shock (%)

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-pest-control-shock-ssp{1,3}-{2035,2050,2080}.toml (develop).