Snippets from
Decision Point... read more at:
www.decision-point.com.au/
Nine steps to a robust ranking
Mixing a little theory, logic and common sense leads to better outcomes
By David Pannell (University of Western Australia)
There are many ways that you can go wrong when putting together
a formula to rank projects, and unfortunately the quality of the
results is quite sensitive to some of the common errors. Common
important mistakes include: weighting and adding variables that
should be multiplied; messing up the comparison of outcomes with
versus without the project; omitting key benefits variables; ignoring
costs; and measuring activity instead of environmental outcomes.
It’s relatively easy to avoid these problems. Apply bit of theory,
some simple logic and a dose of common sense and it’s not hard to
do a pretty good job of project ranking. Indeed, it’s simply a matter
of being able to answer the following set of essential questions. The
answers I have provided here are the basis of the blog series.
1. What is the core criterion?
2. What is it that you’re ranking?
3. What is the benefit?
4. What factors should be taken into account in
working out the benefits?
5. How should these benefit values be combined?
6. Should private costs and benefits be included?
7. What other costs should be included?
8. How do you deal with uncertainty?
9. Should every project go through a rigorous
analysis?
More info: David Pannell david.pannell@uwa.edu.au
How do global priorities stack up when the heat is on?
Climate stability and global conservation priorities
By Takuya Iwamura (Stanford University)
The world’s large global conservation organisations have, for many
years, been devising ways of spatially prioritizing their efforts around the
planet. They all have their own frameworks and approaches with some
prioritising highly fragmented areas to save the last remaining habitats
while others may concentrate on large intact landscapes. Usually this
involves breaking the world into regions with similar ecological features
(eg, ecoregions). New research involving EDG scientists is examining
how well these priority ecoregions will weather climate change, and
they are doing this by measuring the climate stability of these areas
(Iwamura et al., 2010 and 2013).
Conservation planning for climate change has traditionally been
based on the prediction of shifts in species range. It has used species
distribution models which predict species ranges using occurrence
or abundance data and environmental variables. Unfortunately, this
requires detailed data for every species, making it a daunting task to
perform globally.
To get around this, I have led a project to develop an alternative
approach that is based on the notion of climate stability (Iwamura et al,
2010). It’s an approach that doesn’t require the (uncertain) information
on future species range shifts. Rather it considers areas where the
climate is expected to be most stable. Using climate stability information
we modeled possible conservation funding allocations among the
world’s ecoregions to achieve highest biodiversity persistence.
More info: Takuya Iwamura takuya@stanford.edu
Being climate smart means looking forward and backward
Cost-effective conservation in a time of climate change
By James Watson (Wildlife Conservation Society and UQld), Nathalie Butt (UQld) and Takuya Iwamura (Stanford University)
What is ‘climate smart’ when it comes to conservation planning in a
time of climate change? Part of the answer is to take into account how
climate change will impact areas where conservation activities are
planned. For example, you don’t want to invest your limited budget
in a wetland reserve when climate projections suggest the area won’t
support a wetland in the future. Looking at what the future holds
through a climate model lens is important, however, it’s only part of
the story. We’ve demonstrated that cost-effective conservation is only
possible if you also factor in the history of the areas being considered
for conservation activities (Watson et al., 2013).
Up until now, most planning assessments of how future climate change
will affect our land and seascapes have been incomplete. They haven’t
properly factored in how those landscapes have already been modified
by human activities such as land clearing. Too often, assessments that
have been done on future climate vulnerability have looked at the
Earth as a blank slate, assuming that the level of warming a landscape
or species faces is the only variable that counts, rather than a planet
that has been modified in vastly different ways where humans have
settled.
What we found was that when you combine data on how humans have
already changed the land we live on, together with future projections
of climate changes (as discussed on the previous page), you get very
different results to what previous vulnerability maps have shown. By
doing this, we have produced a map that we believe can help guide
decisions about the best places to start for cost-effective conservation.
To date, when considering the impacts of future climate change,
research has usually focussed on individual species’ exposure to
temperature increase, without considering the fact that what makes
a species vulnerable is also a consequence of how sensitive a species
is (which varies from species to species) and their adaptive capacity
(which, among other things, relates to whether they have a healthy
population overall).
Moreover, almost all assessments discount the fact we are in the midst
of a global extinction crisis: most of the climate oriented conservation
science we produce does not consider the fact that many species are
already vulnerable because of the past and current actions
undertaken by humans. There are serious ramifications to
this oversight. Most obviously, it means that we don’t really
know where species are most vulnerable, what actions we
need to take, and which actions are most cost-effective...
More info: James Watson is Director of the Wildlife Conservation
Society’s climate change program, (jwatson@wcs.org), Natalie Butt is a
CEED post doctoral fellow (n.butt@uq.edu.au) and Takuya Iwamura is a
post doctoral fellow at Stanford University (takuya@stanford.edu).
