Over the coming decades, society will have to balance competing needs for land to feed the growing human population, to provide resources and energy to satisfy the ever-accelerating human consumption, to slow global warming and to reduce the rate of loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity. For decision makers to balance these different demands on land, it is crucial that they have access to spatially explicit information and analyses on the effects of different trajectories of human-induced landscape change on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

This report presents a novel analytical framework that is able to provide such information. This framework can be implemented at multiple geographic scales to evaluate priorities for conservation or other action. It considers spatially explicit drivers of land-use change, including changes in human population, commodity markets and agricultural production.

The framework has been applied in the context of UNEP-WCMC’s project on Commodities and Biodiversity, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and implemented in the three MacArthur focal regions which are the Great Lakes of East and Central Africa (henceforth, GLR region) the Greater Mekong and its Headwaters (henceforth, Mekong region) and the Watersheds of the Andes (henceforth, Andes region).