In honor of Earth Day’s 52 years of inspiring environmental action, Earth911 is offering 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week until Earth Day 2023, we will share one action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable.

Maintaining a traditional American lawn all summer can have a significant environmental impact. The chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers we dump on our lawns to make them grow – as well as the gas-powered yard equipment we use to keep grass short – take an environmental toll. Lawns use a lot of water, too – between 30% and 60% of a household’s water is used outdoors. This week, you can invest in the earth by using less water on your lawn.

Action: Be Green by Letting Your Lawn Go Gold

Greener Options

The most sustainable thing you could do with your grass lawn is get rid of it. Replacing grass with nitrogen-fixing clover or other grass alternatives will reduce the inputs required to keep your yard looking nice, and will free up the time you used to spend mowing. But lots of Americans love their grass lawns.

If you can’t bear to part with grass, there are a lot of ways to make your lawn more environmentally friendly. We waste a lot of resources thanks to lawn care myths.

Going Gold

But of all the resources we waste maintaining lawns, the one that’s most relevant during the hottest part of summer is water. Water demand peaks in the summer, during the same time that the Western United States experiences dry weather. During times of drought, which are an increasingly common consequence of climate change, some states and municipalities may ban the watering of lawns or even require their removal. As these sorts of regulations become more common, people are becoming more accepting of the sight of a yellow lawn. In places where rainfall is seasonal, let a lawn go gold in the dry season. Although the lawn may appear to be dead, it will naturally turn green again when the rain returns.

Wise Watering

Although some communities are banning lawns, there are others that require homeowners to maintain a green lawn year-round. And for many homeowners, summer is the time they enjoy their lawn the most. If you can’t give up watering your lawn in the summer, you can still find ways to save water. In that case, you can still take action this week.

Action: Water Wisely

Weekly Water

Daily watering is wasteful and is not healthy for your lawn. It encourages top growth at the expense of root growth. Weak, shallow root systems leave grass vulnerable to stress. Water deeply once or twice a week to enable plants to develop strong root systems that extract water from the soil more efficiently. Established lawns only need to be watered when the plants start to wilt.

More Efficient Water Tips

To minimize evaporation, don’t water during the hottest part of the day. Leave the cuttings on the lawn when you mow to act as a mulch in addition to other benefits. If you have an automatic watering system, inspect it regularly; install a rain shutoff device; and either adjust the schedule monthly or install a WaterSense labeled controller that adjusts your run times according to the weather.

“We need more effective methods of managing acute and chronic pain, and that starts with gaining a better understanding of the basic neural processes that regulate pain,” said NIDCR Director Rena D’Souza, D.D.S., Ph.D. “By uncovering the circuitry that mediates the pain-reducing effects of sound in mice, this study adds critical knowledge that could ultimately inform new approaches for pain therapy.”

Dating back to 1960, studies in humans have shown that music and other kinds of sound can help alleviate acute and chronic pain, including pain from dental and medical surgery, labor and delivery, and cancer. However, how the brain produces this pain reduction, or analgesia, was less clear.

“Human brain imaging studies have implicated certain areas of the brain in music-induced analgesia, but these are only associations,” said co-senior author Yuanyuan (Kevin) Liu, Ph.D., a Stadtman tenure-track investigator at NIDCR. “In animals, we can more fully explore and manipulate the circuitry to identify the neural substrates involved.”

The researchers first exposed mice with inflamed paws to three types of sound: a pleasant piece of classical music, an unpleasant rearrangement of the same piece, and white noise. Surprisingly, all three types of sound, when played at a low intensity relative to background noise (about the level of a whisper) reduced pain sensitivity in the mice. Higher intensities of the same sounds had no effect on animals’ pain responses.

“We were really surprised that the intensity of sound, and not the category or perceived pleasantness of sound would matter,” Liu said.

To explore the brain circuitry underlying this effect, the researchers used non-infectious viruses coupled with fluorescent proteins to trace connections between brain regions. They identified a route from the auditory cortex, which receives and processes information about sound, to the thalamus, which acts as a relay station for sensory signals, including pain, from the body. In freely moving mice, low-intensity white noise reduced the activity of neurons at the receiving end of the pathway in the thalamus.

In the absence of sound, suppressing the pathway with light- and small molecule-based techniques mimicked the pain-blunting effects of low-intensity noise, while turning on the pathway restored animals’ sensitivity to pain.

Liu said it is unclear if similar brain processes are involved in humans, or whether other aspects of sound, such as its perceived harmony or pleasantness, are important for human pain relief.

“We don’t know if human music means anything to rodents, but it has many different meanings to humans — you have a lot of emotional components,” he said.

The results could give scientists a starting point for studies to determine whether the animal findings apply to humans, and ultimately could inform development of safer alternatives to opioids for treating pain.

This research was supported by the NIDCR Division of Intramural Research. Support also came from the National Key Research and Development Program of China Brain Science and Brain-Like Intelligence Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research, Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province, and the University of Science and Technology of China Research Funds of the Double First-Class Initiative.

An international team of experts has produced a list of 15 issues they believe are likely to have a significant impact on marine and coastal biodiversity over the next five to ten years.

Their ‘horizon scanning’ technique focuses on identifying issues that are not currently receiving widespread attention, but are likely to become important over the next decade. The aim is to raise awareness and encourage investment into full assessment of these issues now, and potentially drive policy change, before the issues have a major impact on biodiversity.

The issues include the impacts of wildfires on coastal ecosystems, the effects of new biodegradable materials on the marine environment, and an ’empty’ zone at the equator as species move away from this warming region of the ocean.

“Marine and coastal ecosystems face a wide range of emerging issues that are poorly recognised or understood, each having the potential to impact biodiversity,” said Dr James Herbert-Read in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, joint first author of the paper.

He added: “By highlighting future issues, we’re pointing to where changes must be made today — both in monitoring and policy — to protect our marine and coastal environments.”

The horizon scan involved 30 experts in marine and coastal systems from 11 countries in the global north and south, from a variety of backgrounds including scientists and policy-makers. The results are published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Several of the issues identified are linked to exploitation of ocean resources. For example, deep sea ‘brine pools’ are unique marine environments home to a diversity of life — and have high concentrations of salts containing lithium. The authors warn that rising demand for lithium for electric vehicle batteries may put these environments at risk. They call for rules to ensure biodiversity is assessed before deep sea brine pools are exploited.

While overfishing is an immediate problem, the horizon scan looked beyond this to what might happen next. The authors think there may soon be a move to fishing in the deeper waters of the mesopelagic zone (a depth of 200m — 1,000m), where fish are not fit for human consumption but can be sold as food to fish farms.

“There are areas where we believe immediate changes could prevent huge problems arising over the next decade, such as overfishing in the ocean’s mesopelagic zone,” said Dr Ann Thornton in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, joint first author on the paper.

She added: “Curbing this would not only stop overexploitation of these fish stocks, but reduce the disruption of carbon cycling in the ocean — because these species are an ocean pump that removes carbon from our atmosphere.”

The report also highlights the potential impact of new biodegradable materials on the ocean. Some of these materials are more toxic to marine species than traditional plastics.

Herbert-Read said: “Governments are making a push for the use of biodegradable materials — but we don’t know what impacts these materials may have on ocean life.”

The authors also warn that the nutritional content of fish is declining as a consequence of climate change. Essential fatty acids tend to be produced by cold-water fish species, so as climate change raises ocean temperatures, the production of these nutritious molecules is reduced. Such changes may have impacts on both marine life and human health.

Not all of the predicted impacts are negative. The authors think the development of new technologies, such as soft robotics and better underwater tracking systems, will enable scientists to learn more about marine species and their distribution. This, in turn, will guide the development of more effective marine protected areas. But they also warn that the impacts of these technologies on biodiversity must be assessed before they are deployed at scale.

“Our early identification of these issues, and their potential impacts on marine and coastal biodiversity, will support scientists, conservationists, resource managers, policy-makers and the wider community in addressing the challenges facing marine ecosystems,” said Herbert-Read.

While there are many well-known issues facing ocean biodiversity including climate change, ocean acidification and pollution, this study focused on lesser-known emerging issues that could soon have significant impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems.

This horizon scanning process has previously been used by researchers from the Department of Zoology to identify issues that have later come to prominence, for example, a scan in 2009 gave an early warning that microplastics could become a major problem in marine environments.

The United Nations has designated 2021-2030 as the ‘UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.’ In addition, the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity will conclude negotiations on a global biodiversity framework in late 2022. The aim is to slow and reverse the loss of biodiversity, and establish goals for positive outcomes by 2050.

Issues identified by the report include:

Ecosystem impacts

• Wildfire impacts on coastal and marine ecosystems
• Coastal darkening
• Increased toxicity of metal pollution due to ocean acidification
• Equatorial marine communities becoming depauperate (lacking variety) due to climate migration
• Altered nutritional content of fish due to climate change

Resource exploitation

• Untapped potential of marine collagens and their impacts on marine ecosystems
• Impacts of expanding trade for fish swim bladders on target and non-target species
• Impacts of fishing for mesopelagic (middle-depth) species on the biological ocean pump
• Extraction of lithium from deep-sea brine pools

Novel technologies

• Co-location of marine activities
• Floating marine cities
• Trace element contamination compounded by the global transition to green technologies
• New underwater tracking systems to study non-surfacing marine animals
• Soft robotics for marine research
• Effects of new biodegradable materials in the marine environment

“The hopes and fears that we have on both sides of the debate — neither are realized. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t allow the wolves, the mountain lions, to return to their traditional landscapes — they’re a part of it,” said conservation biologist Bernd Blossey, professor of natural resources and the environment at Cornell University. Blossey is lead author of “Myths, Wishful Thinking, and Accountability in Predator Conservation and Management in the United States,” published June 3 in Frontiers in Conservation Science. His co-author is Darragh Hare of Oxford University.

“Based on the currently available evidence (not just from the United States) large predators, despite their ability to kill ungulates and livestock, will not eliminate deer, threaten people or lead to intolerable losses of livestock — the myths,” the authors write. “On the other hand, large predators are unlikely to right all wrongs humans have inflicted on ecosystems — the wishful thinking.”

On the myths side, there is little evidence for claims that re-introducing large predators such as wolves, bears and mountain lions is a major threat to livestock and wild ungulates such as white-tailed deer, mule deer and elk.

When the U.S. federal government took the wolf off the endangered species list, hunters and livestock producers, and some state governments, called for action combatting what they saw as a need to safeguard the wildlife they wanted to hunt and the livestock that was their livelihood.

But it is nearly impossible to independently evaluate those claims, Blossey said. Other factors also kill livestock, from lightning strikes to hot or and cold weather, parasites, diseases, and poor husbandry and foraging conditions. And there’s much that livestock producers can do to protect their animals from predators, such as deploying more staff, guard dogs and fencing.

And hunters don’t need to worry about wolves competing for deer. The U.S. deer population is at an historic high, in part because humans have given them ideal living conditions and plenty of food. “What we do to landscapes, whether that’s forestry, agriculture or gardening, provide deer with a perfect landscape for them to live in,” Blossey said. “Hunters don’t remove enough deer, cars don’t remove enough. Their populations exploded, because the living conditions were just absolutely wonderful.”

And the wishful thinking — that wolves and other predators can control deer populations and restore degraded ecosystems — lacks evidence as well. When large predators are present in a landscape, deer and other herbivores simply graze when wolves are resting.

“Meaningfully reducing deer populations in Wisconsin alone would require tens of thousands of wolves, at least temporarily until deer populations decline — an ecologically and socially impossible scenario,” the authors write.

And wolves alone can’t undo the ecological damage humans have done, Blossey said. A popular video “How wolves change rivers,” which has been viewed more than 43 million times, suggests that the re-introduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park triggered a cascade of effects that benefited the entire ecosystem.

“I was as fooled like everybody else by the lovely stories that came out of Yellowstone saying, you bring wolves back, and you restore the rivers, and everything’s hunky-dory,” Blossey said.

In fact, these claims may be based on the collection of selective evidence, other research has shown. “Once I started digging like an archaeologist into the literature, I found things that were not supportive of what I thought I knew,” Blossey said. Other factors, such as hunters, grizzly bears, mountain lions, bison, beaver, rainfall patterns, climate, and the quality and quantity of vegetation may have also played significant roles.

Rather than relying on myths and wishful thinking, we should see large predators like wolves as a valuable part ecological communities in their own right, Blossey said, and not just for their function.

“As long as people learn to live with and tolerate the new (old) neighbors,” the authors write, “a careful but not fully conflict-free existence appears possible.”

This year, Earth911 is honoring Earth Day’s 52 years of inspiring action with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week from Earth Day 2022 to Earth Day 2023, we will share one action you can take to save resources, reduce waste, and make your own life more sustainable. This week, you can invest in the earth by signing up for electronic billing.

Paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle, but it still makes up the largest component of Americans’ garbage. A full 25% of municipal solid waste (MSW) in America is paper and paperboard (also called “cardboard”). Eliminating paper waste completely would require a Herculean effort for most people, but just like going plastic-free, you can cut down your paper waste by cutting out paper one category at a time.

Action: Sign Up for Electronic Billing

Paper Problems

At the dawn of the digital age, people excitedly dreamed of the paperless office. Decades later, digitizing still hasn’t eliminated the need to print all kinds of documents. But household bills really don’t need to be printed on paper. Printed bills not only use a lot of paper unnecessarily, but they contain personal information that makes many people uncomfortable simply tossing old bills in the recycling. Shredding protects your data, but shredded paper has a low value for recycling, and many curbside programs won’t accept it. Switching to paperless billing can save as much as 171 pounds of greenhouse gases, 4.5 gallons of gasoline, and 63 gallons of water each year.

Electronic Billing

When electronic billing first became available, many banks charged a fee to set up regular electronic payments, or even fees for each individual electronic transaction. While avoiding unnecessary bank fees is still a major life hack, today, most banks are on board with paperless billing. Some of them now even charge a fee for printed monthly statements! Although people used to worry about security with online bill pay, keeping your finances online is actually safer than receiving paper in the mail – especially if you live in a neighborhood plagued by porch pirates.

Compared to eliminating junk mail, switching to electronic billing is quite straightforward, if a little tedious. If you are the sort of person who files away paid bills, your action this week is to collect all of your bills from the past month. Visit the web address on each bill and follow the instructions there to sign up for e-billing.

If you don’t save old bills, it might be harder to pull everything together to make the switch all at once. In that case, every time you receive a bill for the next month, go online to pay it instead of writing a check. While you’re on the website, change your account settings to receive future bills electronically.

Soon your daily stack of mail should begin shrinking. Use your email account’s tools to ensure bills don’t get buried with the junk email. Flag the senders as important or create folders and filters to collect bills in one “place.” You can also set up autopayments. But even if you do, get a secure app to store the passwords to all those websites for the times you do need to log in.

“The idea of ‘rewilding’ the human microbiome has taken off in recent years and has been hotly debated from medical, ethical, and evolutionary perspectives,” says corresponding author Yang-Yu Liu, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard and an Associate Scientist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH. “It is still unknown if people in industrialized societies can gain some health benefit by restoring their microbiome to an ancestral state. In this paper, we proposed a way to rejuvenate the human gut microbiome.”

FMTs using donor stool have shown benefit for treating some conditions, primarily infections with Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), which affect about half a million people and kill about 29,000 in the United States every year. However, one limitation of using donor stool is variability in the host’s response, likely due to genetic and environmental differences between the donor and host.

Efforts in Yang’s lab focus on understanding the ecological dynamics and organizational principles of the human microbiome to inform the design of microbiome-based therapeutics. OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank based in Somerville, Massachusetts, is the first stool bank to offer an option for individuals to bank their own stool for future treatment of C. diff infection. Yang and his colleagues looked at whether this approach might be feasible on a large scale for many other diseases.

“Conceptually, the idea of stool banking for autologous FMT is similar to when parents bank their baby’s cord blood for possible future use,” says Yang. “However, there is greater potential for stool banking, and we anticipate that the chance of using stool samples is much higher than for cord blood.”

“But there are many practical issues to implementing this idea,” says Yang. The article takes a closer look at some of those issues, including optimal storage methods, how much stool should be banked, and what the costs might be.

“Autologous transplants would naturally avoid or at least mitigate donor-recipient compatibility issues, but a major disadvantage of autologous transplants is the need for long-term cryopreservation of stool samples, typically requiring liquid nitrogen storage,” says co-author Shanlin Ke, a postdoctoral research fellow in Yang’s lab. “The long-term safe storage and subsequent resuscitation and cultivation of stool samples is a fundamental research question by itself. To inform practical guidelines for stool banking, further research is needed to systematically test longer storage times and preservation, resuscitation, and cultivation procedures.”

Yang acknowledges that widespread banking could lead to a system in which those with more financial resources are more likely to have banked stool for future use. “We do not anticipate that all individuals in our society are willing or able to pay the cost associated with the service of ‘rejuvenating’ their gut microbiome, in the same way that not all parents pay the cost of cord blood banking for their newborns,” he says. “But as scientists our job is to provide a scientific solution that may eventually benefit human well-being. Developing a reasonable business model and pricing strategy so that the solution is affordable to everyone would require the joint force of entrepreneurs, scientists, and perhaps governments.”

“Autologous FMTs have the potential to treat autoimmune diseases like asthma, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, obesity, and even heart disease and aging,” says co-author Scott T. Weiss, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard and Associate Director of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH. “We hope this paper will prompt some long-term trials of autologous FMTs to prevent disease.”

This work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01AI141529, R01HD093761, RF1AG067744, UH3OD023268, U19AI095219, and U01HL089856).

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A team of researchers led by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at the Yale School of the Environment explored this concept and found that there’s potential for partners to influence each other through conversations on climate change.

“We wanted to see if there’s potential for couples to increase support for pro-climate policies and behaviors through more conversations about climate change,” says Matthew Goldberg, associate research scientist at YPCCC and lead author on the study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

The researchers surveyed 758 romantic couples to determine the extent to which they understood each other’s ideas on climate change and the degree to which partners were aligned on climate change beliefs and behaviors.

The team asked each partner questions on the issue, including whether they are worried about climate change, donate to climate organizations, and post about the issue on social media. Participants also were asked to predict what their partner would say.

The results revealed that while many partners exhibited similar beliefs and behaviors around climate change, there also were many discrepancies. There was only 38% alignment between partners on their climate beliefs and only 31% alignment on climate behaviors. The study also found that partners who discuss climate change had a more accurate perception of the other’s beliefs.

These results suggest there’s an opportunity for partners to influence each other through more conversations about climate change.

The researchers used the YPCCC’s Global Warming’s Six Americas framework to classify the participants’ views. The Six Americas framework is based on a range of six viewpoints about climate change that stretch from “alarmed,” at which climate change is seen as an urgent threat, to “dismissive,” at which global warming is considered a hoax or a nonexistent issue.

While there were very few instances of couples holding opposite views, more than a third of couples included one partner whose beliefs were classified as “alarmed,” while the other was a bit less engaged or concerned.

This disparity is exactly the kind of situation where there’s an opportunity to shift the needle on climate change beliefs and behaviors, Goldberg says.

“Mass communication is critical but might not be the most effective way to shift public support on climate change,” he says. “A partner knows their partner infinitely better than some unknown communicator — and knows how to harness the issues that their partner cares about to engage them in action on climate change.”

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment, who co-authored the report, says talking about climate change is no substitute for action but can help raise awareness of the issue.

“This study finds that people who are very concerned about climate change likely have close significant others that haven’t yet fully engaged the issue. Climate conversations can start right at home, with your loved ones,” Leiserowitz says.

Goldberg says their findings could apply to all kinds of relationships beyond romantic ones and the results open an array of avenues to engage people on climate change.

“Lots of people are very worried about climate change, but they’re not talking about it,” he says. “Discussing climate change can bring more people into alignment — and increase engagement.”

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The study’s findings are critical because as the Amazon moves closer towards a ‘tipping point’, they provide a robust evidence base to inform urgently needed conservation and regeneration priorities in the forest. They show that gains can be achieved through a range of actions — including, but not limited to, halting deforestation.

The research, which is published today in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was conducted by an international team of scientists from Brazil and the UK. They examined the ecological impacts caused by changes people are making to forest landscapes in two regions of the Brazilian State of Pará — Santarém and Paragominas.

“While the focus to date has been on deforestation, we know tropical forests landscapes are being altered by a much broader range of human activities,” said lead researcher Dr Cássio Alencar Nunes from Universidade Federal de Lavras in Brazil and Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. “These modifications include deforestation and degradation of primary forest, for example through selective logging and fires, but even deforested landscapes are changing as agricultural abandonment leads to secondary forest regrowth. As a result, many tropical landscapes are now a mosaic of non-forest land uses, regenerating secondary forests, and degraded primary forests.”

By investigating the rate of transformation between different land-uses and their impacts on the ecological condition, the researchers identified the transitions that are common and have high ecological impacts, as well as those that have large impacts but occur less frequently.

“Our results have revealed a richer understanding of how people are affecting the Amazon and its ecosystem,” said Dr Alencar Nunes.

Collecting data from 310 plots, the researchers looked how changes affect biodiversity, examining more than 2,000 species of trees, lianas, birds and insects. They also looked at carbon and soil properties.

The researchers also used published data from 2006-2019 about how quickly the landscape has changed over the past decade.

Their results show that transitions from primary and secondary forests to pasture through deforestation amounted to 24,000 km² a year. They found that species richness of almost all biodiversity groups declined by between 18 and 100 per cent across plots where primary or secondary forest had been converted to pasture or mechanized agriculture. Transitions from forest to mechanized agriculture had the most ecological impact but occurred less frequently than conversion of forests to pasture.

“Deforestation of primary forests to create pasture is the most damaging land-use change in the Brazilian Amazon,” said Dr Alencar Nunes. “Our results show that transitions from primary forests to pasture were always classed as ‘high impact, high rate’ for biodiversity, carbon storage and soil properties. This underlines the critical and urgent importance of combating deforestation, which has been increasing in the past few years.”

However, the study also revealed opportunities for positive action, for example highlighting the importance of protecting secondary forests and allowing them to mature. They found that the diversity of large trees doubled and small tree diversity increased by 55 per cent when young secondary forests became older than 20 years — bringing biodiversity and carbon storage gains.

Other results revealed less obvious forms of degradation that are affecting the Amazon’s ecology. They found that changing between types of farming, from cattle pasture to more intensive mechanized agriculture, also diminishes biodiversity, with the diversity of ants and birds decreasing by 30 per cent and 59 per cent respectively.

Dr Alencar Nunes said: “These are important findings as they show that there are a multitude of actions that can be taken to protect and improve the ecology of the Amazon. When farmers switch land from pasture to growing crops using mechanized agricultural methods, that is also impacting on biodiversity, but it is a process that is largely hidden when compared to deforestation.

“By reducing the amount of land that is converted to mechanical farming, and by allowing secondary forests to regrow, we can deliver significant ecological restoration gains in the Amazon.

“Our analysis helps to define and prioritise the local and regional actions required to stimulate a better Amazonia.”

Co-author Jos Barlow, Professor of Conservation Science at the Lancaster Environment Centre of the Lancaster University, highlighted that the study has further implications for conservation and policy.

He said: “Our results emphasise yet again the importance of tackling deforestation, as well as the additional benefits of avoiding degradation and enhancing the permanence of secondary forests. However, achieving this will require transforming the way the Amazon is currently being managed, including a much better integration of science, policy and local practices.

“We also highlight the need to focus on biodiversity as well as carbon in tropical forests — of the three ecosystem components that we analysed, biodiversity was the most affected by all the land-use changes. We hope that biodiversity can be included in climate change mitigation actions, and that this will be emphasised in the upcoming COP15 on Biodiversity.