Each new year presents a chance to explore potential challenges and emerging opportunities that could redefine biodiversity conservation. Recently, I worked with a team of 32 international scientists and practitioners to conduct a horizon scan, a collaborative process designed to raise awareness of emerging risks and advances in conservation. After consulting more than 600 experts from a wide range of geographies and institutions, we identified the 15 most significant and novel issues likely to shape environmental conservation over the next decade.
Those critical issues—ranging from the loss of Antarctic sea ice to the effect of human activity on seabed carbon stores—are outlined in our study, published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. The analysis is the 16th in an annual series coordinated by the U.K.-based Cambridge Conservation Initiative and was partially funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. We hope that identifying these challenges and opportunities early will help policymakers and practitioners minimize the threats and improve biodiversity protection worldwide.
Several of the topics identified in this year’s horizon scan overlap with initiatives led by Pew. Below is a closer look at some of the issues most relevant to Pew’s conservation efforts:
Rare earth elements—a group of raw metals used in products such as cellphones, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines—are often mined using methods that can harm the environment. More than 90% of rare earth element mining and processing occurs in China—a worrisome concentration for many reasons, including economic and national security risks associated with supply chain disruptions.
A promising alternative source of these metals involves using certain species of macroalgae (seaweed), which grows quickly and can absorb minerals from its environment at remarkably high rates. Experts could then extract those minerals from the seaweed. This process could be further enhanced through biomass processing, which could also convert the energy stored in seaweed into biofuels to power cars and other vehicles. If improved macroalgae farming and processing techniques prove viable at scale, the ocean could become a sustainable source of rare earth elements, reducing the need for destructive mining.
Long thought to have been stable, Antarctic sea ice has been declining steadily in recent years. In fact, of the eight lowest years on record for sea ice coverage in the region, five have occurred since 2016.
This widespread loss of sea ice around the continent may soon have large-scale consequences for marine life in the Southern Ocean. The reduction in sea ice changes the location and reduces the biomass of algae blooms that many species rely on for food, allowing more light to penetrate the water and disrupting the balance of plankton and bottom-dwelling organisms. These changes could shift coastal ecosystems from being dominated by animals to being overrun by macroalgae, which would decrease ecosystem stability.
Marine sediments hold some of Earth’s largest stores of carbon. Every year, around 350 million tons of carbon accumulates in these sediments, mostly along continental edges. Human activities, such as bottom trawling, seabed mining, and other industrial processes, can disturb these sediments and release this carbon back into the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about where and how carbon is deposited in seabeds, and how much human disturbances such as trawling contribute to carbon emissions.
As the world works to reduce carbon emissions, developing more accurate measurements of carbon loss from the seabed could encourage stricter regulations on activities that disturb the ocean floor. This could have important implications for protecting marine biodiversity, addressing climate change, and balancing industrial interests with conservation.
Offshore wind installations generate electricity by using turbines placed over open water to capture wind energy. These turbines are either fixed to the seafloor in shallow areas or rise from large floating platforms in deeper waters. Scientists have long recognized the direct effects of these turbines on marine species, such as collisions or displacement, but new research is uncovering potential indirect impacts.
For example, both fixed and floating wind farms alter the way wind energy is transferred into the water, which can lead to increased mixing of water layers. This is especially noticeable in areas with weak tidal currents where increased mixing brings nutrients to the surface, potentially disrupting the growth of algae—and sending ripple effects throughout the marine food web. It remains uncertain whether these changes will affect large areas, such as the southern North Sea, or yield localized and temporary impacts.
The extent of the benefits and harm from the opportunities and risks highlighted in the 2025 horizon scan will become clearer in the coming years. Indeed, some of these issues might not materialize. Nevertheless, the purpose of our analysis is to bring attention to these issues, to spark discussions about the future of the environment, and to encourage further scientific research.
Jim Palardy leads The Pew Charitable Trusts’ conservation science work.