Making biodiversity an equal partner in large-scale, multi-resource climate resilience assessment and investment

The fast pace of large-scale ecosystem change, precipitated by increasingly novel climate conditions, is pushing conservation investment strategies commit to time-bounded outcomes at national and global scales (e.g., 30x30 national and global initiatives). Historically, conservation investments by governments or conservation institutions had relatively narrow, resource-specific biodiversity objectives. Today, governments and institutions are grappling with ecosystem-level impacts, with the need to simultaneously evaluate risk, vulnerability, high value resources, and mitigation effectiveness across multiple resource areas and their associated ecosystem services. Data, modeling, and evaluation systems that can address ecosystem-wide resource conditions and management options in the face of climate change are greatly needed to support effective conservation investment and action.

We developed a model (PROMOTE) that provides a quantitative representation of climate-informed management strategies across ten resources areas (pillars of resilience) that span and represent socio-ecological systems resilience, with biodiversity conservation being one of the pillars or resilience. The PROMOTE model uses a state-of-the-art climate analog modeling technique to generate 30-m pixel scale, resource-specific representations of future resource stability based on the combination of the magnitude of climate change and resource vulnerability for each of ten resource pillars. We applied this model across the western United States, where climate change is already threatening the persistence of most of the country’s conifer forest ecosystems. We found that carbon and biodiversity are highly compatible conservation objectives (e.g., current areas of high value align), but their areas of future resource stability differ. Furthermore, future stability of forest resilience is generally poor in many areas that are currently high value for biodiversity and carbon. We highlight how the PROMOTE modeling approach, and its companion software tool Planscape, enables governments and institutions to consider the impact of future climate on biodiversity in the context of whole-ecosystem conservation. We demonstrate that this more holistic approach to conservation assessment and investment can results in significantly different investment priorities and expected outcomes, based on their likelihood of future stability, integrity, and persistence. These considerations have substantial implications for regional, national, and global conservation initiatives.