The economic costs of biological invasions in Central and South America: a first regional assessment

Abstract

Invasive alien species are responsible for a high economic impact on many sectors worldwide. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies assessing these impacts in Central and South America. Investigating costs of invasions is important to motivate and guide policy responses by increasing stakeholders’ awareness and identifying action priorities. Here, we used the InvaCost database to investigate (i) the geographical pattern of biological invasion costs across the region; (ii) the monetary expenditure across taxa and impacted sectors; and (iii) the taxa responsible for more than 50% of the costs (hyper-costly taxa) per impacted sector and type of costs. The total of reliable and observed costs reported for biological invasions in Central and South America was USD 102.5 billion between 1975 and 2020, but about 90% of the total costs were reported for only three countries (Brazil, Argentina and Colombia). Costs per species were associated with geographical regions (i.e., South America, Central America and Islands) and with the area of the countries in km2. Most of the expenses were associated with damage costs (97.8%), whereas multiple sectors (77.4%), agriculture (15%) and public and social welfare (4.2%) were the most impacted sectors. Aedes spp. was the hyper-costly taxon for the terrestrial environment (costs of USD 25 billion) and water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) was the hyper-costly taxon for the aquatic environment (USD 179.9 million). Six taxa were classified as hyper-costly for at least one impacted sector and two taxa for at least one type of cost. In conclusion, invasive alien species caused billions of dollars of economic burden in Central and South America, mainly in large countries of South America. Costs caused by invasive alien species were unevenly distributed across countries, impacted sectors, types of costs and taxa (hyper-costly taxa). These results suggest that impacted sectors should drive efforts to manage the species that are draining financial sources.

Economic costs of biological invasions in the United Kingdom

“…Most costs stemmed from direct damage rather than management spending and principally impacted the agriculture sector. This dominance of damage-related costs over management aligns with trends in other geographic regions worldwide (Crystal-Ornelas et al 2021;Haubrock et al 2021a;Heringer et al 2021;Liu et al 2021). Invasion impacts in the UK were largely driven by animals, which were both the most studied and costliest taxa.…”

Biological invasions in France: Alarming costs and even more alarming knowledge gaps

“…By using phone calls, e-mailing, and by circulating questionnaires, we have been able to collect the majority of cost information (1,106 cost entries collected from 39 documents, as compared with 26 cost entries with the classical InvaCost Database search), revealing that even if cost data were poorly documented in France and overseas territories, those data do exist as grey literature. High percentages of non-English costs were also reported in other countries, such as in Spain or Japan (98%, Angulo et al 2021c;and 100%, Watari et al 2021, respectively), and this percentage was lower but also important in countries such as Germany or Ecuador (69%, Haubrock et al 2021b;52%, Ballesteros-Mejias et al 2021) or in general in the Central and South America continent and in Asia (Heringer et al 2021;Liu et al 2021). In line with the recent suggestion from Blackburn et al (2020), this observation proves that academics must continue their engagements towards a more collaborative science for improving the sharing of knowledge and having adequate communication of invasion science findings to the public (Mattingly et al 2020), and ultimately an ability to better tackle the issues caused by invasive alien species.…”

“…Yet, the direct medical costs resulting from the expanding populations of vector mosquitoes remain poorly documented. High costs for Aedes species were expected in the French territories located in the Americas (French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe), as these species were also the costliest species in the Central and South America region and in specific countries therein such as Ecuador or Argentina (Ballesteros-Mejia et al 2021;Duboscq-Carra et al 2021;Heringer et al 2021). For these French territories in the Americas, Uhart et al (2016) documented 4,574 hospitalisations of approximately 4.3 days each for patients affected by dengue, with a mean cost per stay of US$ 2,849.…”

Economic costs of invasive alien species in Spain

“…97% for France, Renault et al 2021; 69% for Germany, Haubrock et al 2021b). For instance, in Central and South America over 40% of cost estimates came from Spanish and Portuguese sources (Heringer et al 2021); and in Ecuador 51.8% of the costs were reported in Spanish (Ballesteros-Mejia et al 2021). An extreme situation is observed in Japan, where all recorded costs were in Japanese (Watari et al 2021), although this was a common trend in Asia (reviewed in Liu et al 2021).…”