Research into biodiversity and human society could be improved through the development of a global biodiversity monitoring system similar to the system implemented to monitor climate change, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said.

Questions such as what fraction of biodiversity needed protection to secure human society’s future, for instance, could be answered if observation of changes in biodiversity was standardised on a global scale, it added.

“This will be similar to what the climate change community did to standardise the measuring and monitoring of climate change variables to inform global policy-making,” the council said in a statement.

The proposed monitoring system should be based on a set of technically  and economically feasible, globally agreed essential biodiversity variables (EBVs), following in the steps of climate change monitoring systems’ use of 50 “essential climate variables”.

The variables enable systematic observation, underpinning the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explained CSIR systems ecologist Dr Bob Scholes.

CSIR ecosystem services specialist Dr Belinda Reyers agreed, saying that the adoption of EBVs would provide the building blocks required by scientists to answer interesting and important questions about the relationship between biodiversity and economic and social development. It also enabled a platform for decision-makers to set goals and measure progress.

Scholes pointed out that the EBV approach would advance research past the point of “what species occur where” and delve into the genetic level, citing the example of reaching a point where scientists were able to determine what fraction of the grasslands required protection to secure water supplies or how many rhino is too few.

The Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network commented that the development of these variables would be crucial for robust calculation of the indicators to assess progress towards the 2020 targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Some suggested EBVs included the genetic diversity of selected wild and domestic species; the population abundances for groups of species representative of some taxa; the three-dimensional structure of habitats; and the nutrient retention rate in sensitive ecosystems.