Abstract
Protecting natural habitats in priority areas is essential to halt the loss of biodiversity. Yet whether these benefits for biodiversity also yield benefits for human well-being remains controversial. Here we assess the potential human well-being benefits of safeguarding a global network of sites identified as top priorities for the conservation of threatened species. Conserving these sites would yield benefits – in terms of a) climate change mitigation through avoidance of CO2 emissions from deforestation; b) freshwater services to downstream human populations; c) retention of option value; and d) benefits to maintenance of human cultural diversity – significantly exceeding those anticipated from randomly selected sites within the same countries and ecoregions. Results suggest that safeguarding sites important for biodiversity conservation provides substantial benefits to human well-being.
Highlights
Conserving important sites for biodiversity is essential to meet internationally agreed goals of preventing species extinctions and slowing biodiversity loss [1]
The aggregated values for the network of priority sites performed significantly better for all four ecosystem services than the random networks of sites in the countries and ecoregions where the sites are found (Fig. 1)
We found that the network of priority sites performed significantly better than expected for all four ecosystem services
Summary
Conserving important sites for biodiversity is essential to meet internationally agreed goals of preventing species extinctions and slowing biodiversity loss [1]. As an example of a comprehensive global network of priority sites, we focused on those identified by the Alliance for Zero Extinction [14] as holding the last remaining population of one or more Endangered or Critically Endangered species [15] This network of critical sites for global species conservation serves as an important blueprint for targeted conservation action for species, for example in informing actions by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the World Bank (http://www.thegef.org/gef/press_release/CBD_COP10_AZE). This investigation of the joint biodiversity and ecosystem service roles of these sites is a key step in guiding the planning of these and other funding bodies. We focus this study on the aggregated delivery of ecosystem services because of the uncertainty for values of specific sites due to the use of global datasets
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