Agreed but not preferred: expert views on taboo options for biodiversity conservation, given climate change

Abstract

Recent research indicates increasing openness among conservation experts toward a set of previously controversial proposals for biodiversity protection. These include actions such as assisted migration, and the application of climate-change-informed triage principles for decision-making (e.g., forgoing attention to target species deemed no longer viable). Little is known however, about the levels of expert agreement across different conservation adaptation actions, or the preferences that may come to shape policy recommendations. In this paper, we report findings from a web-based survey of biodiversity experts that assessed: (1) perceived risks of climate change (and other drivers) to biodiversity, (2) relative importance of different conservation goals, (3) levels of agreement/disagreement with the potential necessity of unconventional-taboo actions and approaches including affective evaluations of these, (4) preferences regarding the most important adaptation action for biodiversity, and (5) perceived barriers and strategic considerations regarding implementing adaptation initiatives. We found widespread agreement with a set of previously contentious approaches and actions, including the need for frameworks for prioritization and decision-making that take expected losses and emerging novel ecosystems into consideration. Simultaneously, this survey found enduring preferences for conventional actions (such as protected areas) as the most important policy action, and negative affective responses toward more interventionist proposals. We argue that expert views are converging on agreement across a set of taboo components in ways that differ from earlier published positions, and that these views are tempered by preferences for existing conventional actions and discomfort toward interventionist options. We discuss these findings in the context of anticipating some of the likely contours of future conservation debates. Lastly, we underscore the critical need for interdisciplinary, comparative, place-based adaptation research.

Quantifying the National Significance of Local Areas for Regional Conservation Planning: North Carolina’s Mountain Treasures

“…Many of the Mountain Treasures lie between existing protected areas and therefore represent important priorities for maintaining connections between existing conservation reserves including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and wilderness areas in the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests (Figure 4). Creating a connected network of protected areas is among the highest recommended adaptation strategies to maintain biodiversity under a changing climate [7,10,33,34].…”

Ethics of Conservation Triage

“…In the biodiversity conservation sector, triage has been interpreted as allowing some critically endangered species to go extinct in order to save others (Jachowski and Kesler, 2009). This interpretation has led conservation triage to be a poignantly controversial issue (Hagerman et al, 2010) with people either promoting triage, accepting the concept but being uncomfortable with its application, or resisting it (Colyvan and Steele, 2011;Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014).…”

“…The often-inadequate budgets for conservation (Balmford et al, 2003;McCarthy et al, 2012) and the predicted impacts of global change (Rudd, 2011;Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014) suggest that conditions that incite the need to prioritize conservation actions given resource constraints (referred to herein as the triage context) are often unavoidable. From this point of view, triage is seen as a rational (and even inevitable) approach to prioritization under resource scarcity (Bottrill et al, 2009), although taken often with moral discomfort (Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014).…”

“…The often-inadequate budgets for conservation (Balmford et al, 2003;McCarthy et al, 2012) and the predicted impacts of global change (Rudd, 2011;Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014) suggest that conditions that incite the need to prioritize conservation actions given resource constraints (referred to herein as the triage context) are often unavoidable. From this point of view, triage is seen as a rational (and even inevitable) approach to prioritization under resource scarcity (Bottrill et al, 2009), although taken often with moral discomfort (Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014). Interestingly, the need for prioritization more generally is typically not contested (Hagerman et al, 2010;Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014), unanimously seen as better than decision-making strategies of "no prioritization" or ad hoc prioritization that is not guided by an explicit decisionmaking system (Martin et al, 2012).…”

“…From this point of view, triage is seen as a rational (and even inevitable) approach to prioritization under resource scarcity (Bottrill et al, 2009), although taken often with moral discomfort (Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014). Interestingly, the need for prioritization more generally is typically not contested (Hagerman et al, 2010;Hagerman and Satterfield, 2014), unanimously seen as better than decision-making strategies of "no prioritization" or ad hoc prioritization that is not guided by an explicit decisionmaking system (Martin et al, 2012). Proponents of conservation triage typically cite a utilitarian reasoning for its justification: maximizing benefits given resource constraints, even if this means that some species may be sacrificed in order for resources to be more efficiently distributed.…”