Global conservation priorities based on human need
16 Jul, 2009 11:19 am
Gary Luck and colleagues' paper Protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity in the world's watersheds, recently posted online in Conservation Letters, is a novel approach to an admittedly problematic aspect of conservation biology: global prioritisation schemes.
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Well, Luck and colleagues have taken us one step closer to global acceptance of conservation prioritisation schemes by basing this latest addition on ecosystem services. In their paper they divided the world by catchments (watersheds) and then estimated the services of water provision, flood prevention and carbon storage that each provides to humanity. Water provision was a estimated as a complex combination of variables that together can be interpreted as the capacity of ecosystems to regulate water flows and quality that benefit humans (e.g., influencing seasonal water availability or nutrient levels). Flood mitigation was estimated as the system?s capacity to reduce the impact of floods on communities, and carbon storage was estimated as the system?s capacity to uptake carbon in soils and vegetation.
In general, the catchments in need of the highest priority protection were found in the poorest areas (namely, South East Asia and Africa) because their protection would be the least costly and benefit the most people. Luck and colleagues are therefore the first to incorporate cost?benefit trade-offs explicitly in developing global priorities for protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity. I take my hat off to them for a modern and highly relevant twist on an old idea. Great paper and I hope people take notice.
Read the paper on Conservation Letters
Originally posted on ConservationBytes.com
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caravans