Influence of adaptive capacity on the outcome of climate change vulnerability assessment.

ABSTRACT: Climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) has become a mainstay conservation decision support tool. CCVAs are recommended to incorporate three elements of vulnerability - exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity - yet, lack of data frequently leads to the latter being excluded. Further, weighted or unweighted scoring schemes, based on expert opinion, may be applied. Comparisons of these approaches are rare. In a CCVA for 17 Australian lizard species, we show that membership within three vulnerability categories (low, medium and high) generally remained similar regardless of the framework or scoring scheme. There was one exception however, where, under the warm/dry scenario for 2070, including adaptive capacity lead to five fewer species being classified as highly vulnerable. Two sp

SUBMITTER: Ofori BY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5636830 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature