Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing

Extinction is a critical issue, with land-use change the main threat to many terrestrial species. Understanding and tackling this requires global, comparable, and scalable metrics that link land-cover change to extinction risk and are useable across diverse conservation contexts. Here, we demonstrate the flexibility of the new Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions (LIFE) metric through five distinct case studies.

1. We explore the near real-time quantification of biodiversity harms in tropical hotspots by integrating LIFE with forest loss data.
2. We couple LIFE with crop distribution and trade data to assess variation in extinction impacts mediated by food consumption – specifically of apples in the UK.
3. We test LIFE’s suitability for use in biodiversity compensation through a hypothetical scenario in Sumatra.
4. We use LIFE to prioritize competing conservation investments by comparing benefits of area-based projects in Honduras.
5. We combine LIFE with counterfactual methods to evaluate the effectiveness of a long-term conservation project in Sierra Leone.

Together, these examples show that LIFE offers actionable insights into a geographically and thematically wide range of conservation challenges, from land-use planning to sustainable consumption. Like all global metrics, LIFE’s broad applicability relies on assumptions and simplifications. It should be used cautiously, and alongside local knowledge and ground-truthing, especially for restoration, offsetting, or fine-scale analysis, and in poorly studied areas. By providing an accompanying “How-to” guide, we aim to ensure LIFE can be used widely to inform understanding of the extinction crisis and support tangible actions to halt it.