The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Ecosystems are connected to other systems through physical flows, economic dependence, social reliance and ecological feedback. When an ecosystem degrades, the effects rarely stay inside it. This page sets out the main pathways by which biodiversity loss reaches water, food, infrastructure, health and finance, and how other risks feed back into ecological decline. It describes connections; it is not a forecast.
Dependencies and consequences in Biodiversity Nexus describe how biodiversity and nature, climate and hazards, and oceans and coasts connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Diplomacy Nexus and Climate and Nature Governance. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; it describes connections, not a forecast.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Wetlands and forests regulate flows and sediment; reefs and mangroves dissipate wave energy. Their loss changes flood, drought and erosion behaviour downstream and along coasts.
Pollination, pest control, soil fertility and fish recruitment are inputs to production. Their decline raises costs, lowers yields and can shift prices along supply chains.
Communities that depend directly on local resources lose income and food first. Habitat change can also alter contact between people, livestock and wildlife and with it disease exposure.
Climate change shifts temperatures and rainfall faster than many species can move or adapt, and extreme events such as marine heatwaves, droughts and fires can push stressed systems past thresholds. Infrastructure, from roads to dams, fragments habitats and alters flows. Pollution from agriculture and industry changes nutrient balances in rivers and coastal waters. Financial and policy incentives decide where land is cleared or protected.
These feedbacks mean that ecological decline and other risks can reinforce one another. A degraded catchment increases flood damage, reconstruction encroaches further on floodplains, and the next flood is worse. Recognising such loops is the main reason the platform works across fields rather than treating nature in isolation.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdependency | A two-way dependency between infrastructures, such as power needing telecoms for control while telecoms need power to run. |
| Cascading risk | Risk that a failure in one system or component triggers failures in others that depend on it. |
| Compound event | Two or more hazards or drivers occurring together or in sequence whose joint impact exceeds what either would cause alone, such as drought followed by intense rain; IPCC assessments use the term. |
| Dependency mapping | Tracing the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers a service relies on. |
Dependency analysis uses complex systems modelling, spatial statistics and causal inference, with ecological evidence from ecology and biodiversity science. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; see methods and uncertainty.
A dependency map shows how stress could travel. It does not predict that it will, and it does not assess any individual firm, site or project.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.