Spatial priorities for biodiversity and ecosystem services considering theoretical decision-makers’ attitudes to risk

Lijuan Wang, Hua Zheng, Stephen Polasky, Yanxu Long

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Choosing appropriate spatial priorities for protected areas (PAs) to conserve ecosystem services (ESs) and biodiversity is a challenge for decision makers under limited land resources, especially when facing uncertain protection consequences or conflicting protection objectives. Attitudes toward risk will influence actions, which will, in turn, impact consequences. To understand how theoretical decision-makers’ attitudes towards risk impact protection effectiveness for biodiversity and ESs (e.g., water retention, soil retention, flood mitigation, water purification and carbon sequestration) and how this information can be integrated into effective PAs management, we examined Hainan Island as a case study. We used the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) algorithm to assess the impact of attitude towards risk in PA management. Decision-makers’ attitude towards risk scenarios (from risk-averse and risk-taking) showed higher mean protection effectiveness (2.41–2.85) than existing PAs (2.37), indicating that there is still room for improvement in biodiversity and ESs conservation in existing PAs. In addition, among the seven examined risk scenarios, the higher risk aversion scenario showed the best outcome. In comparison to existing PAs, this scenario improved mean protection effectiveness (20.13%) as well as the protection effectiveness of water retention (24.84%), water purification (11.46%), flood mitigation (8.84%), soil retention (16.63%), carbon sequestration (5.31%), and biodiversity (12.84%). Thus, our research shows that the influence of theoretical decision-makers’ attitudes towards risk could be considered by OWA method which could provide a normative model of what the right choice given theoretical risk attitudes is while selecting priority area for biodiversity and ESs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number115007
JournalEnvironmental Research Communications
Volume3
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41925005; 41871217) and Special Research Assistant Grant Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We thank the anonymous reviewers and academic editor for the invaluable suggestions.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Keywords

  • Attitude to risk
  • Biodiversity
  • Ecosystem services
  • Multiple objective assessment
  • Ordered weighted averaging
  • Spatial priorities

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Spatial priorities for biodiversity and ecosystem services considering theoretical decision-makers’ attitudes to risk'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this