The relative importance of COVID-19 pandemic impacts on biodiversity conservation globally

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on almost all aspects of human society and endeavor; the natural world and its conservation have not been spared. Through a process of expert consultation, we identified and categorized, into 19 themes and 70 subthemes, the ways in which biodiversity and its conservation have been or could be affected by the pandemic globally. Nearly 60% of the effects have been broadly negative. Subsequently, we created a compendium of all themes and subthemes, each with explanatory text, and in August 2020 a diverse group of experienced conservationists with expertise from across sectors and geographies assessed each subtheme for its likely impact on biodiversity conservation globally. The 9 subthemes ranked highest all have a negative impact. These were, in rank order, governments sidelining the environment during their economic recovery, reduced wildlife-based tourism income, increased habitat destruction, reduced government funding, increased plastic and other solid waste pollution, weakening of nature-friendly regulations and their enforcement, increased illegal harvest of wild animals, reduced philanthropy, and threats to survival of conservation organizations. In combination, these impacts present a worrying future of increased threats to biodiversity conservation but reduced capacity to counter them. The highest ranking positive impact, at 10, was the beneficial impact of wildlife-trade restrictions. More optimistically, among impacts ranked 11-20, 6 were positive and 4 were negative. We hope our assessment will draw attention to the impacts of the pandemic and, thus, improve the conservation community's ability to respond to such threats in the future.     

The species awareness index as a conservation culturomics metric for public biodiversity awareness

Although threats to global biodiversity are well known, slowing current rates of biodiversity loss remains a challenge. The Aichi targets set out 20 goals on which the international community should act to alleviate biodiversity decline, 1 of which (Target 1) aims to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity. Although conventional indicators for Target 1 are of low spatial and temporal coverage, conservation culturomics metrics show how biodiversity awareness can be quantified at the global scale. Following methods used for the Living Planet Index, we devised a species awareness index (SAI) to measure change in species awareness based on Wikipedia views. We calculated this index at the page level for 41,197 species listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) across 10 Wikipedia languages and >2 billion views from 1 July 2015 to 30 March 2020. Bootstrapped indices for the page-level SAI showed that overall awareness of biodiversity increased marginally over time, although there were differences among taxonomic classes and languages. Among taxonomic classes, overall awareness increased fastest for reptiles and slowest for amphibians. Among languages, overall species awareness increased fastest for Japanese and slowest for Chinese and German users. Although awareness of species as a whole increased and was significantly higher for traded species, from January 2016 through January 2020, change in awareness appeared not to be strongly related to whether the species is traded or is a pollinator. As a data source for public biodiversity awareness, the SAI could be integrated into the Conservation International Biodiversity Engagement Indicator.     

Passive air sampling for persistent organic pollutants: introductory remarks to the special issue

There have been a number of developments in the need, design and use of passive air samplers (PAS) for persistent organic pollutants (POPs). This article is the first in a Special Issue of the journal to review these developments and some of the data arising from them. We explain the need and benefit of developing PAS for POPs, the different approaches that can be used, and highlight future developments and needs.     

Contingent Valuation and Real Economic Commitments: Evidence from Electric Utility Green Pricing Programmes

This paper presents the findings of two 'green pricing' studies conducted to evaluate public support of utilities' investments in renewable energy technologies. These studies compared hypothetical WTP statements with actual payment commitments. The results of these studies indicate that the CVM can be an accurate indicator of an individual's WTP, but that it is an unreliable predictor of which individuals will actually pay. This has important implications for aggregating mean WTP estimates of the value of environmental benefits. It also suggests that market simulations can be useful for predicting programme participation rates when voluntary donations are used as a payment vehicle.     

Human Population Density and Prediction of Local Plant Extinction in Britain

Throughout the world, and particularly in densely populated countries like Britain, human activities exert a dominant influence on the abundance of both plants and animals. The commonness and rarity of plants in Britain has been plausibly linked to human land use. In Western Europe the identity of increasing and decreasing plants appears to depend on human population density, which is itself a crude measure of human impact on the landscape. The publication of new data on the changing distributions of scarce British plants allowed us to investigate the relationship between loss of scarce plants and human population density in Britain. Our results confirm that a direct effect of human population density on local plant extinctions can be detected at the regional scale in Britain. Although intensive agriculture is conventionally regarded as the greatest threat to British wildlife, our analysis suggests that urbanization may be at least as significant a danger.     

The limits to risk aversion: Part 2: The permission point and worked examples

Part 2 extends the analysis to show that it is possible to find the “permission point”, the value of (the coefficient of relative) risk-aversion, at which decisions to sanction environmental protection are most likely to be made. The mathematical model describes the process by which the decision maker varies his risk-aversion over a range of feasible values to find the risk-aversion that will give him the greatest desire to invest in the protection system under consideration. If he can find such a risk-aversion before losing discrimination (because the system is too expensive, given its performance), he will adopt it as his “permission point” and decide in favour of the expenditure. The permission point is, of course, bounded above by the point of indiscriminate decision. A maximum Risk Multiplier calculated at the point of indiscriminate decision may be applied to the protection expenditure at monetary break-even to give the maximum, rational outlay on protection. Moreover, it is possible to model how the average UK adult should take decisions on protection to maximise his utility. Different situations will call for different values of risk-aversion, which may explain why economists have come up with differing estimates of this parameter in the past. However, a central, average risk-aversion may be calculated for the average UK adult as 0.85, which is within 4% of the value, 0.82, found from the newly reported method based on a trade-off between income and future free time, and is consistent with several recent economic estimates. Worked examples assess how much an organisation should spend on a protection scheme to prevent accidents with very large environmental consequences.     

Extending the J-value framework for safety analysis to include the environmental costs of a large accident

A severe accident on an industrial plant has the potential to cause, in addition to human harm, general damage and hence expense, associated with ground contamination, evacuation of people and business disruption, for example. The total cost of damages, given the name “environmental costs” in this paper, may be comparable with or larger than the cost of direct health consequences, as assessed objectively by the J-value approach. While the low probability of the accident may mean that the expectation of monetary loss is small, the paper develops a utility-based approach to determine how much should be spent on protection systems to protect against both environmental costs and human harm. The behaviour of the fair decision maker in an organisation facing possible environmental costs is represented by an Atkinson Utility function, which is dependent on the organisation's assets and on the elasticity of marginal utility or, equivalently, the coefficient of relative risk aversion, “risk-aversion” for short. A Second Judgment Value, J₂, may be derived from the spend on the protection system after subtracting the amount sanctioned to prevent direct human harm. This net, environmental expenditure is divided by the most that it is reasonable to spend to avert environmental costs at the highest, rational risk-aversion. The denominator in this ratio is found by first calculating the maximum, sensible spend at a risk-aversion of zero, and then multiplying this figure by a Risk Multiplier to give the maximum, fair amount to avert environmental costs. The Risk Multiplier incorporates a risk-aversion that is as large as it can be without rendering the organisation's safety decisions indiscriminate and hence random. An overall, Total Judgment Value, the J_T-value, may also be calculated, which takes into account the reduction in both human harm and environmental cost brought about by the protection system. The new J_T-value will show similar behaviour to the original J-value, in that J_T-values up to unity will indicate reasonable value for money, while J_T-values greater than unity will indicate a prima facie overspend on protection that will need to be justified by further argument. While the analysis is phrased in terms of environmental costs, the treatment is sufficiently general for all costs, including onsite damages, loss of capability etc. to be included. The new, J_T-value method provides for a full and objective evaluation of the worth of any industrial protection system. A worked example is given.     

Conserving alpha and beta diversity in wood-production landscapes

International demand for wood and other forest products continues to grow rapidly, and uncertainties remain about how animal communities will respond to intensifying resource extraction associated with woody bioenergy production. We examined changes in alpha and beta diversity of bats, bees, birds, and reptiles across wood production landscapes in the southeastern United States, a biodiversity hotspot that is one of the principal sources of woody biomass globally. We sampled across a spatial gradient of paired forest land-uses (representing pre and postharvest) that allowed us to evaluate biological community changes resulting from several types of biomass harvest. Short-rotation practices and residue removal following clearcuts were associated with reduced alpha diversity (−14.1 and −13.9 species, respectively) and lower beta diversity (i.e., Jaccard dissimilarity) between land-use pairs (0.46 and 0.50, respectively), whereas midrotation thinning increased alpha (+3.5 species) and beta diversity (0.59). Over the course of a stand rotation in a single location, biomass harvesting generally led to less biodiversity. Cross-taxa responses to resource extraction were poorly predicted by alpha diversity: correlations in responses between taxonomic groups were highly variable (−0.2 to 0.4) with large uncertainties. In contrast, beta diversity patterns were highly consistent and predictable across taxa, where correlations in responses between taxonomic groups were all positive (0.05–0.4) with more narrow uncertainties. Beta diversity may, therefore, be a more reliable and information-rich indicator than alpha diversity in understanding animal community response to landscape change. Patterns in beta diversity were primarily driven by turnover instead of species loss or gain, indicating that wood extraction generates habitats that support different biological communities.