Impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems in Bavaria: a sectoral analysis

Sven Rubanschi, Anne Lewerentz, Andreas Krause, Jana Blechschmidt, Stefan Fallert, Elizabeth Gosling, Konstantin Gregor, Isabelle Jarisch, Christian Stetter, Maximilian Brönner, Florian Hartig, Markus Hoffmann, Julia Kieslinger, Thomas Knoke, Perdita Pohle, Uta Raeder, Mona Reiss, Wolfgang W. Weisser, Sebastian T. Meyer, Johannes Sauer, Juliano Sarmento Cabral & Anja Rammig

Abstract

Climate change is expected to create a range of impacts on biodiversity, land use, and economic activities, but those sector impacts are rarely analysed together. Here, we assess how climate change and socioeconomic narratives will affect land use and biodiversity in the state of Bavaria, Germany. We apply a multi-sectoral modelling approach with two climate projections (RCP 2.6 and 8.5) downscaled from three different climate models in combination with three land-use scenarios: biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. We evaluate changes in different sectors such as forestry and agriculture, considering impacts on carbon storage, terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity, and the adaptation of agricultural practices. In our simulations, biodiversity declined sharply under the higher emission scenario, highlighting climate change as a major threat to biodiversity in Bavaria. Prioritising biodiversity through forest conversion and expanding pasture reduced species decline and enhanced carbon storage more effectively than pure climate-focused mitigation. Climate change intensity had minimal impacts on land-use patterns (e.g. allocation of forest types), but it significantly changed farmers’ preferences, increasing their inclination toward more conservative land management practices, i.e. favouring the status quo. We conclude from our findings that policymakers should strategically prioritise biodiversity protection alongside targeted forest-management practices to simultaneously enhance ecosystem health, biodiversity, and carbon storage. Intensified agricultural and land management, on the other hand, should be approached cautiously to avoid biodiversity loss.

What the paper shows and why it matters

(AI-generated)

Land-use change is a major documented threat to biodiversity, yet projections of how climate change will affect biodiversity often keep land use fixed. Models that do include land use often fail to treat it as a consequence of climate change (Cabral et al. 2024). Global emission and socioeconomic scenarios are centred on climate rather than on biodiversity, and according to a global assessment even their most sustainable variants would not stop biodiversity loss (Pereira et al. 2024). Judging regional biodiversity change therefore requires looking at land-use priorities, warming and several sectors together, which is rarely done. This missing regional view is the paper’s starting point.

The study, a simulation of Bavaria that links seven sectoral models, finds that climate change is a major threat to biodiversity there, larger than the effect of the land-use narratives, and that land-use policy can limit the resulting decline but not offset it. The models (vegetation and carbon, crops, farmers, insects, plants, habitats, lake plants) are driven by a low- and a high-emission pathway (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5), each combined with three stylised land-use narratives: biodiversity protection, climate-change mitigation and climate-change adaptation. Under RCP8.5 nearly all biodiversity projections declined, most strongly for insects and forest biotopes; insect abundance, for example, declined in every narrative, whereas vascular plants were less affected. The biodiversity-protection narrative (less forest harvest, a shift to mixed forest, part of the arable land turned into pasture and forest) slowed the decline most and stored the most carbon, mainly in vegetation. The mitigation narrative stored more carbon in wood products but was the worst of the three for biodiversity.

**Fig. 3.** Maps of Bavaria illustrating changes across the individual sectors: A biodiversity, B carbon storage, C land use, and D the sector with the most pronounced changes, highlighting change hotspots. From Rubanschi et al. (2026), *Regional Environmental Change*, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Click the image to enlarge.

The results suggest that, in Bavaria, protecting biodiversity and storing carbon can be pursued together: in the simulations, the biodiversity-protection narrative protected species better than the mitigation narrative while storing more carbon, and the paper advises prioritising biodiversity alongside targeted forest management. They also indicate the limit of regional policy, because the largest biodiversity losses came with strong warming, which Bavarian land-use decisions cannot prevent; regional action therefore needs worldwide action on climate change alongside it. The paper presents its scenarios as a policy-screening tool, since projections to 2100 are uncertain and the scenarios leave out how policy would react to changes in climate, land use and biodiversity.

References

Cabral et al. (2024). The road to integrate climate change projections with regional land‐use–biodiversity models. People and Nature 6, 1716–1741. doi:10.1002/pan3.10472
Pereira et al. (2024). Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050. Science 384, 458–465. doi:10.1126/science.adn3441