A climatic stability approach to prioritizing global conservation investments.

ABSTRACT: Climate change is impacting species and ecosystems globally. Many existing templates to identify the most important areas to conserve terrestrial biodiversity at the global scale neglect the future impacts of climate change. Unstable climatic conditions are predicted to undermine conservation investments in the future. This paper presents an approach to developing a resource allocation algorithm for conservation investment that incorporates the ecological stability of ecoregions under climate change. We discover that allocating funds in this way changes the optimal schedule of global investments both spatially and temporally. This allocation reduces the biodiversity loss of terrestrial endemic species from protected areas due to climate change by 22% for the period of 2002-2052, when compa

SUBMITTER: Iwamura T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2994894 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature