Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.
Authors
Beyer, Hawthorne L
Crouzeilles, Renato
Iribarrem, Alvaro
Barros, Felipe
de Siqueira, Marinez Ferreira
Sansevero, Jerônimo Boelsums Barreto
Brancalion, Pedro Henrique Santin
Broadbent, Eben North
Chazdon, Robin L
Filho, Ary Oliveira
Gardner, Toby A
Latawiec, Agnieszka
Mills, Morena
Possingham, Hugh P
Rodrigues, Ricardo Ribeiro
Scaramuzza, Carlos Alberto de Mattos
Scarano, Fabio Rubio
Uriarte, Maria
Publication Date
2019-01Journal Title
Nat Ecol Evol
ISSN
2397-334X
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
3
Issue
1
Pages
62-70
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Physical Medium
Print-Electronic
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Strassburg, B. B., Beyer, H. L., Crouzeilles, R., Iribarrem, A., Barros, F., de Siqueira, M. F., Sánchez-Tapia, A., et al. (2019). Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.. Nat Ecol Evol, 3 (1), 62-70. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0743-8
Abstract
International commitments for ecosystem restoration add up to one-quarter of the world's arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here, we present a restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options. Using an actual large-scale restoration target of the Atlantic Forest hotspot, we show that our approach can deliver an eightfold increase in cost-effectiveness for biodiversity conservation compared with a baseline of non-systematic restoration. A compromise solution avoids 26% of the biome's current extinction debt of 2,864 plant and animal species (an increase of 257% compared with the baseline). Moreover, this solution sequesters 1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (a 105% increase) while reducing costs by US$28 billion (a 57% decrease). Seizing similar opportunities elsewhere would offer substantial contributions to some of the greatest challenges for humankind.
Keywords
Conservation of Natural Resources, Ecosystem, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Brazil, Carbon Sequestration
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0743-8
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/287585
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