Due to the shortage of financial resources for international conservation assistance, the setting of priorities for this assistance is an important issue. A national biodiversity risk assessment ...index (NABRAI) is constructed to quantify national conservation performances and identify nation states of critical conservation concern. The index, which contains measures of biodiversity stock, flow and response measures, attempts to overcome several weaknesses present in other models used to prioritize nations for conservation assistance. Multivariate analyses of the index as well as economic and biodiversity resources reveal significant positive correlations between the NABRAI values and population density as well as land area exposed to high disturbance intensity. The combination of the multivariate analyses and the interpretation of NABRAI values allows for prioritization of biodiversity risk among the global community and can thus serve as an indicator of current priorities for policy makers. The present study also suggests two methods to incorporate a better understanding of biodiversity risk in models of conservation priorities; by including a wider range of variables and by developing a theoretical foundation for the relationship between the categories of variables used in the model.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The need to develop sustainably on a finite planet has become increasingly
evident 1,2. Sustainable development requires multi-scale policies, plans
and decision-making that acknowledge the ...importance of meeting current and future human needs without undermining the resilience of natural
systems and the environment. In the past decade, we have seen significant advances in our understanding of the social and biophysical aspects
that determine the state and dynamics of social-ecological systems 3,4,5.
However, the translation of this knowledge into actionable strategies, designed to inform management and policy and enhance equitable sustainable development and environmental stewardship, is limited 6,7,8,9.
Measures of conservation effort can be expected to be partly dependent on available economic resources. The present study evaluates the relationships between conservation effort and resource ...availability. The uneven distribution of biodiversity and economic resources, as well as Conservation capacities between developed and developing nations, is also quantified. The absence of a relationship between indicators of conservation capacity and available economic resources suggests a lack of explicit national policy goals and conservation budgets, particularly with regard to the development of a biodiversity-related scientific capacity. A negative relationship between the biodiversity scientific capacity within developing nations and the amount of development aid received may be interpreted as either aid not being effectively channelled into building scientific capacity in the developing world, or it may reflect a lag period between investment and development. The variables reflecting available economic resources appear to play a less significant role in developing nations, than in developed nations. This could be explained by the lower variation within the values of these variables for developing nations, or by the fact that developed nations lie above a minimum economic threshold at which investment in conservation becomes possible. Explicit policy objectives for addressing these shortcomings are proposed.
The semi-arid rangelands of South Africa comprise some of the most biodiversity rich landscapes in the country. Decisions regarding their management, therefore, have important implications for this ...global asset (Mittermeier et al., 2005). These rangelands are also some of the most poorly conserved regions in the country, falling below the national average of 6% of their area under protection (Reyers et al., 2007). Options for expanding the protected reserve network are limited by budgets and tenure arrangements. Furthermore, the ecological processes and functions associated with these rangelands can operate over large geographic scales and establishing and expanding reserves alone will
Conservation biology evolved as a mission-oriented, crisis discipline over 20 years ago out of a “sense of despair felt by a group of visionary scientists deeply concerned about the destructive ...impact of human beings on the natural world” (Redford and Sanjayan, 2003). This new discipline drew on existing, largely biological, disciplines, integrating them to address the problems of protection and persistence of species, as well as communities and ecosystems affected by human actions (Soulé, 1985; Meine et al., 2006). The descriptors of “crisis discipline” and “mission oriented” set this emerging discipline apart from cognate ones. The term “crisis” implies that
One of the major objectives of this TEEB book is to assess current approaches for using ecological sciences and economics for informed choices and decision making. On the one hand TEEB intends to ...better inform conventional economic policy about its impacts on ecosystem health and biodiversity, on the other it suggests ways to mainstream the valuation of ecosystem services into national and local planning and policies as well as business assessments of their economic impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. The previous six chapters assess the state of art of our scientific understanding underlying economic analysis of ecosystem services and biodiversity. Chapter 1 in this volume identifies several challenges in integrating the disciplines of ecology and economics and organizes the complexities of the problem resulting from the differences in methodological frameworks in relation to variation in temporal and spatial scales. For example, the relevant time horizon for a cost-benefit analysis of afforestation or ecosystem restoration project is 10-20 years while the changes in biodiversity could occur on a time scale ranging from short - a fraction of a second (molecular level) to long - millions of years (biome level). Chapter 2 highlights that ecosystems typically produce multiple services that interact in complex ways. A resilient ecosystem maintains a flow of ecosystem services on a continuous basis, but ecosystems may or may not be resilient to anthropogenic disturbances. Chapter 3 suggests that biodiversity and ecosystems are amenable to economic analysis only if they can be quantified and several approaches for developing indicators are discussed. Chapters 4 and 5 together highlight the socio-cultural embeddedness of ecosystem service and biodiversity valuation, as well as its constraints and limitations. Chapter 4 outlines the role and importance of valuation as a human institution and places in context the role of economic valuation. Chapter 5 explains how, for a chosen set of ecosystem indicators and within a structured economic valuation framework, there could be reliable approaches for the economic valuation of ecosystem services. Chapter 5 also highlights commonly practised methods of ecosystem service valuation, and discusses their constraints and limitations. Chapter 6 assesses the basis of choosing appropriate discount rates to be applied to a project with impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity.
A lack of relevant information at different scales has hampered the ability to assess the economic consequences of the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity.
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