ESS221 chapter8 Conservation Planning
Channel: Richard Knight
Date: 2020-05-24

For Conservation Planners the effects of climate change are a very important consideration to include in conservation plans.


A brief introduction to conservation planning follows for those of you not familiar with the field

Basically, conservation planning is the use of systematic techniques to identify priority areas for conservation attention – be that protected areas or forms of conservation management. Margules and Pressey present a good review of the field in the 2000 publication in Nature.


Spatial data on biodiversity, land cover transformation and protected areas are inputs into the process, along with conservation targets for that biodiversity e.g. the numbers of species or area of ecosystems desired as goals of the conservation plan. The software and GIS process these data and provide outputs of conservation priority areas which can differ depending on the software, conservation plan and inputs.


Traditionally the field of conservation planning has a very static focus and is based on the distribution of biodiversity at one point in time. Although work on ecological and evolutionary processes and their inclusion into conservation planning has moved towards a more dynamic focus.


However, if one looks at this slide of the current distribution of species richness for a selected set of taxa in the grasslands of South Africa and compares it to the predicted distribution of that species richness under conditions of climate change one understands that planning for the conservation of these species will differ between current and future scenarios of climate change.


Additionally this work on the distribution of species in South Africa shows how the current and future of the country will differ significantly and thus a conservation plan based on current information will not cater for what the future holds.


Work on conservation planning now indicates that the conservation strategies that we use today will soon be obsolete under conditions of climate change. Examples in support of this statement are the predictions of what will happen to flagship protected areas in South Africa.

There is thus an urgent need to include the implications of climate change into conservation planning and ensure that conservation planning becomes dynamic and includes the constraints of future climate change. These novel conservation strategies have been terms climate change-integrated strategies.