Kaixuan Pan

The United Nations has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. Despite this commitment, mining remains a major driver of biodiversity decline, particularly in conservation priority zones (CPZs) and areas with high species extinction risk. Regardless of growing awareness, the full extent of current and future mining threats to biodiversity remains inadequately quantified, limiting effective global conservation strategies. Here, we quantify the threats of 145,000 km² of current mining land to biodiversity. We find that 34% (49,000 km²) of these mining areas overlap with CPZs, intersecting the ranges of more than 2,300 species, including many classified as threatened. These threats span 14 biomes, with disproportionately high relative impacts in fragile ecosystems such as Mangroves and the Mediterranean. Furthermore, an additional 43% (12 million km²), 29% (2 million km²), and 37% (4 million km²) of land potentially exploitable for metals, non-metals, and coal, respectively, overlap with CPZs, highlighting the heightened risks from future mining expansion without consideration for biodiversity. Our findings offer actionable insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders, guiding conservation efforts to mitigate biodiversity loss and align mining practices with global conservation goals, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The species‐area relationship is a cornerstone of biodiversity theory and conservation. Yet, its temporal stability remains largely untested. Using nearly a century of disjunct vegetation‐plot data from the Netherlands, we assess changes in the species‐area relationship by constructing species‐accumulation curves (SACs). We show that SACs have flattened significantly over time, indicating widespread biodiversity decline driven by habitat degradation and spatial homogenization, even within protected areas. Although grassland biodiversity has rebounded, forest biodiversity continues to decline, suggesting a greater extinction debt. These findings provide unprecedented evidence that biodiversity patterns captured by SACs shift over time. They also reveal a critical limitation of conservation strategies that rely solely on protected area expansion. As global biodiversity goals aim to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, our results emphasise the need for adaptive conservation strategies that integrate area‐based protection with large‐scale habitat restoration and improved ecosystem management.

The United Nations has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030, yet mining remains a major driver of biodiversity decline, particularly in conservation priority zones and areas with high species extinction risk. The accelerating clean energy transition intensifies this conflict, as demand for critical minerals essential for renewable technologies creates unprecedented pressures on biodiversity hotspots. Despite growing awareness, the full spatial extent of current and future mining threats to biodiversity remains inadequately quantified, limiting the effectiveness of global conservation strategies and sustainable development pathways.Here, we provide the first comprehensive, spatially explicit assessment of mining threats to biodiversity by compiling 145,000 km² of current mining footprints and analyzing their overlap with conservation priority zones (CPZs) and species extinction risks across 14 biomes globally. We find that 34% of current mining areas overlap with CPZs, threatening over 2,300 species, including many classified as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. These threats disproportionately affect fragile ecosystems such as Mangroves and Mediterranean biomes. Critically, our analysis reveals that minerals essential for the clean energy transition, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, show the highest overlap with CPZs and areas of elevated extinction risk compared to fossil fuels, creating a direct conflict between climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals.Future projections demonstrate that without proactive spatial planning, an additional 43% (11.7 million km²) of areas potentially exploitable for metals, 29% (2.2 million km²) for non-metals, and 36% (387,000 km²) for coal overlap with CPZs, highlighting heightened risks from mining expansion. Our buffer analysis shows that inadequate spatial containment could escalate biodiversity threats by 4-54 times for CPZs and 7-562 times for extinction risks.We provide actionable solutions for navigating this nexus: spatial exclusion of mining from high-priority biodiversity areas, strengthened governance and community co-management, advanced restoration technologies, and circular economy strategies to reduce mineral demand. Our spatially explicit findings offer critical guidance for policymakers and industries to align mining practices with the Global Biodiversity Framework and Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating pathways to reconcile resource extraction with biodiversity conservation in the clean energy era.

The interruption of plant‐pollinator interactions may threaten global plant diversity, food security and ecosystem stability. Recent reports of strong declines in both insects and plants point to insect decline as a driver of plant decline. However, it is still unknown whether these trends are related as plants often produce seeds without the need for insect pollinators, and to what extent insect‐pollinated plants have declined in relation to plants not pollinated by insects. In this study, we hypothesise that natural plant communities have shifted away from insect‐pollination. We combined 365,768 vegetation plots from 1930 to 2017 in the Netherlands and plant traits to assess the changes in occurrences of plants pollinated by different modes. Furthermore, we included key drivers in plant decline—specifically nitrogen, moisture and habitat types—as interaction factors to explore the persistence of the observed changes under different environmental conditions. The proportion of insect‐pollinated plants has declined while that of wind‐pollinated plants has increased over the last 87 years. This proportional change reflects an absolute decrease in the number of insect‐pollinated species and an increase in the number of wind‐pollinated species. Synthesis and applications. This study implies that Dutch landscapes are losing insect‐pollinated plant species, which is likely due, at least in part, to the decline in pollination services. Our results of quantifying the decline in insect‐pollinated plants support the necessity and urgency of taking conservation initiatives. Several management strategies and policy recommendations could be applied to alleviate the decline of insect‐pollinated plants and ensure crop safety. For example, conserving natural environments by reducing nitrogen deposition may support local plants and insect pollinators. Additionally, there is a particular need for focused efforts to protect natural grasslands, as these areas harbour many insect‐pollinated plants, which have experienced declines. Finally, monitoring and assessing the state of both pollinators and (insect‐pollinated) plants is needed to assess the progress of conservation measures. While recognising the interdependence of pollinators and pollinated plants, it is crucial to extend efforts beyond pollinator conservation alone to effectively safeguard insect‐pollinated plants and ensure crop safety.

While shifts to high-intensity land cover have caused overwhelming biodiversity loss, it remains unclear how important natural land cover is to the occurrence, and thus the conservation, of different species groups. We used over 4 million plant species’ observations to evaluate the conservation importance of natural land cover by its association with the occurrence probability of 1 122 native and 403 exotic plant species at 1 km resolution by species distribution models. We found that 74.9% of native species, 83.9% of the threatened species and 77.1% rare species preferred landscapes with over 50% natural land cover, while these landscapes only accounted for 15.6% of all grids. Most species preferred natural areas with a mixture of forest and open areas rather than areas with completely open or forested nature. Compared to native species, exotic species preferred areas with lower natural land cover and the cover of natural open area, but they both preferred extremely high and low cover of natural forest area. Threatened and rare species preferred higher natural land cover, either cover of natural forest area or cover of natural open area than not threatened and common species, but rare species were also more likely to occur in landscapes with 0–25% cover of natural open area. Although more natural land cover in a landscape will not automatically result in more native species, because there is often a non-linear increase in species occurrence probability when going from 0% to 100% natural land cover, for conserving purposes, over 80% natural land cover should be kept in landscapes for conserving threatened and very rare species, and 60% natural land cover is the best for conserving common native species. Our results stress the importance of natural areas for plant species’ conservation. It also informs improvements to species conservation by increasing habitat diversity.