Climate change will make conservation even pricier

If you think saving endangered species is expensive now, just wait a few decades. Climate change will require protected areas to expand if species are to be saved, potentially doubling the cost of such conservation efforts.

That's the conclusion of three studies that estimate how habitats will be affected by the warming climate, and how much more of the planet will need to be set aside as a result.

Rebecca Shaw of the Environmental Defense Fund in San Francisco, California and colleagues studied the Nature Conservancy's Mount Hamilton project, which spans 3200 km² of California. They focused on 11 species in the area with known climate tolerances.

They then combined the results of 16 climate models to estimate how the local climate within the project will change between now and 2100. That allowed them to determine how each species' habitat would move, grow or shrink ? and thus how much more land would need to be acquired and maintained to preserve them.

The analysis suggests that the project will need an extra 2560 km² of land by 2050. The figure had risen to 3800 km² by 2100. Shaw estimates the extra cost at $1.73 billion by 2050, and $2.54 billion by 2100. That is slightly more than double the cost of maintaining the project in the absence of climate change.

Costs of change

Shaw says the results won't be the same for all species, because some are more tolerant of climate change than others. "Even so, it is very likely that responses in many other kinds of habitats will be equally dramatic," she says.

Two other studies published this month back Shaw's claim. Russell Wise of Csiro Environmental Services in Canberra, Australia, and colleagues focused on the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa. There are already plans to expand the protected area by 2410 km² over the next 50 years, to help the ecosystem cope with climate change. Wise estimates this will cost at least $260 million, and possibly four times that figure.

Meanwhile Jonah Busch of Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia, and colleagues ran similar models to see how climate change up until 2080 would affect 74 plants living on Madagascar. As the climate changed, the models suggested that conservationists would need to adopt ever more expensive strategies to ensure the plants still had sufficient habitat.

"These studies show it is going to get harder and more costly to conserve nature in the future," Shaw says.

Journal references: Conservation Biology

Shaw et al DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01824.x

Wise et al DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01841.x

Busch et al DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01838.x

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