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Spending money to protect biodiversity from climate change: How to allocate funding?

A recent article in Nature Climate Change addresses the difficult question on how to use scarce funding to protect biodiversity from the threat of climate change. Although the article focuses on the South African fynbos, the case study provides a helpful example of how resource managers can (and should) most effectively allocate funding resources across different conservation tools. Separate commentary by Josh Lawler nicely encapsulates and extends the argument in a couple pages. [Unfortunately, both articles require paid subscription.]   

Full citation: Wintle, Brendan A. and et al. 2011. Ecological–economic optimization of biodiversity conservation under climate change. Nature Climate Change 1, 355-359.

Commentary:  Lawler, Joshua J. 2011. Adaptation: Conservation for any budget. Nature Climate Change 1.

Abstract of Wintle article: Substantial investment in climate change research has led to dire predictions of the impacts and risks to biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report cites 28,586 studies demonstrating significant biological changes in terrestrial systems. Already high extinction rates, driven primarily by habitat loss, are predicted to increase under climate change. Yet there is little specific advice or precedent in the literature to guide climate adaptation in- vestment for conserving biodiversity within realistic economic constraints. Here we present a systematic ecological and economic analysis of a climate adaptation problem in one of the world’s most species-rich and threatened ecosystems: the South African fynbos. We discover a counterintuitive optimal investment strategy that switches twice between options as the available adaptation budget increases. We demonstrate that optimal investment is nonlinearly dependent on available resources, making the choice of how much to invest as impor- tant as determining where to invest and what actions to take. Our study emphasizes the importance of a sound analytical framework for prioritizing adaptation investments. Integrating ecological predictions in an economic decision framework will help support complex choices between adaptation options under severe uncertainty. Our prioritization method can be applied at any scale to minimize species loss and to evaluate the robustness of decisions to uncertainty about key assumptions.

Posted by Charles Chester on Thursday, November 3, 20116:19PM

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