Abstract
Economic assessments for invasive alien species (IAS) are an urgent requirement for informed decision-making, coordinating and motivating the allocation of economic and human resources for the management of IAS. We searched for economic costs of IAS occurring in Spain, by using the InvaCost database and requesting data to regional governments and national authorities, which resulted in over 3,000 cost entries. Considering only robust data (i.e. excluding extrapolated, potential (not-incurred or expected) and low reliability costs), economic costs in Spain were estimated at US$ 261 million (€ 232 million) from 1997 to 2022. There was an increase from US$ 4 million per year before 2000 to US$ 15 million per year in the last years (from € 4 to 13 million). Robust data showed that most reported costs of IAS in Spain (> 90%) corresponded to management costs, while damage costs were only found for 2 out of the 174 species with reported costs. Economic costs relied mostly on regional and inter-regional administrations that spent 66% of costs in post-invasion management actions, contrary to all international guidelines, which recommend investing more in prevention. Regional administrations unequally reported costs. Moreover, 36% of the invasive species, reported to incur management costs, were not included in national or European regulations (i.e. Black Lists), suggesting the need to review these policies; besides, neighbouring regions seem to manage different groups of species. We suggest the need of a national lead agency to effectively coordinate actions, facilitate communication and collaboration amongst regional governments, national agencies and neighbouring countries. This will motivate the continuity of long-lasting management actions and the increase in efforts to report IAS costs by regional and inter-regional managers which will adequately provide information for future budgets gaining management effectiveness.
Highlights
Invasive alien species (IAS) can cause significant negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts (Blackburn et al 2019)
Only 90 out of 3,260 raw entries were extrapolated, potential and/or unreliable costs, these constituted 99.08% of the economic costs in our dataset (Fig. 1e). Most of these high costs were driven by one single entry: a cost derived from an extrapolation of the potential loss of forestry stock caused by Bursaphelenchus mucronatus, the pine wood nematode, over a period of 22 years (2008–2030, Suppl. material 2: Fig. S1)
As for other countries and regions, our results show that not accounting for sources of information besides those written in English would have led to a significant knowledge gap and bias for this first assessment of global costs of invasive species in Spain (Angulo et al 2021)
Summary
Invasive alien species (IAS) can cause significant negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts (Blackburn et al 2019). These include loss of biodiversity (Simberloff et al 2013; Bellard et al 2016), changes to ecosystem functioning (Ehrenfeld 2011), impacts on human health and well-being (Jeschke et al 2014) and large economic losses. Available data are scarce, scattered and not accessible and extrapolation-based approaches underlying most of these estimates are methodologically questionable (Cuthbert et al 2020) These fragmented data and methodological flaws are reflected by critical knowledge gaps on the economic costs of IAS for most taxa, countries and regions of the world (Aukema et al 2011). An urgent requirement for informed decision-making by policy-makers and other stakeholders, for coordinating and motivating the allocation of economic and human resources for the management of IAS and for raising public awareness (Hulme 2006; Andreu et al 2009; Diagne et al 2020a, 2021a)
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