Robust Conservation Planning for Biodiversity Under Climate Change Uncertainty

When designing new protected areas, conservation managers often use bioclimatic models to anticipate the effects of climate change on species distributions. Recent studies have shown that the outputs of such models frequently differ in direction and magnitude, generating uncertainties that compromise their value for guiding conservation plans. Traditional approaches tend to minimise this uncertainty by designing adaptive strategies or by complexifying predictive models. However, these approaches may prove inadequate when uncertainty grows too large, as is the case with climate change. Here, rather than attempting to reduce uncertainty, we propose to embrace and value it in order to seek conservation measures that are as robust as possible to many plausible futures. By adapting this “Robust Decision Making” framework to conservation, we stress tested five generic conservation strategies against hundreds of plausible futures, for each of 22 species of concern. Our conceptual study seeks the strengths and vulnerabilities of each strategy across many possible future directions, facilitating both decision-making amongst strategies and emergence of robust and adaptive conservation plans. We anticipate our approach to offer an innovative framework to complement classic species conservation planning methods by reducing sensitivity to climate change uncertainty and improving the overall performance of conservation actions.