Towards a unified framework for biodiversity action in the Triple Planetary Crisis
Climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss constitute the Triple Planetary Crisis, eroding the ecological foundations of economies, public health, and human wellbeing. Yet among these threats, biodiversity remains the least understood and least integrated into policy and decision-making. Monitoring efforts are fragmented and often fail to capture how multiple pressures-chemical pollution, invasive species, habitat degradation, eutrophication, and climate extremes-interact to drive non-linear ecosystem decline. This gap leaves societies poorly equipped to anticipate and mitigate ecological risks. We outline an interdisciplinary framework that combines deep-time ecological and environmental records with emerging forecasting tools to reconstruct long-term baselines and predict complex biodiversity responses to interacting stressors. We further identify pathways to embed these diagnostics into economic and governance systems, linking biodiversity directly to risk assessment, investment decisions, and regulatory frameworks. Together, these advances point toward a decision-support platform that enables governments, businesses, and communities to anticipate risks, evaluate interventions, and design strategies that align biodiversity protection with resilience in economies and societies.
Authors
- Alberto Di Minin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4904-1335)
- Leo Posthuma (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0399-5499)
- Jacopo Cricchio (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3723-6741)
- Henner Hollert
- Francisco Sylvester
- Martin Wilkes
- Luisa Orsini
- Jiarui Zhou
- Werner Brack
Institutions
- University of Essex (GB)
- Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
- Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (DE)
- Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
- Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (IT)
- National Institute of Public Health (KH)
- National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (NL)
- Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (DE)
- University of Birmingham (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Environment International
- Published
- 2026-03-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2026.110205
- Primary Topic
- Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00