Quantifying impacts of policy and practice interventions on biodiversity and climate

There is urgent demand for ecosystem management interventions – targeted actions through policies and practices – that meaningfully address climate change and biodiversity loss while sustaining ecosystem delivery of water, food, fibre and fuel. Rigorous quantification of intervention outcomes is required for decision makers to identify, promote and scale effective interventions. Yet quantification of intervention effectiveness – i.e. their real-world impact – is hampered by limited use in ecology of causal approaches that generate counterfactual, empirical evidence at the scales of policy and practice actions. Here, we review the historical development of causal approaches and ecological experimentation, and emerging efforts to reunite the two. Reunification requires ecology to broaden its philosophical consideration of the validity and generalisability of evidence and to expand its experimental framework. Such an ‘applied causal ecology’ promises evidence that builds confidence that policy and practice interventions will sustain ecosystem services and achieve biodiversity and climate goals.