The environmental and socioeconomic interactions between distant regions of the world (“telecoupling”) are dramatically increasing. Telecoupling brings about new challenges and opportunities to biodiversity conservation that are of a larger magnitude and of a faster pace than ever observed before. Our understanding of the dynamics and leverage points of this telecoupled world is however limited. It is thus important to take stock of what we know and what we still need to know to formulate effective biodiversity conservation policies with telecoupling increasing.