A tale of two diversities

Pierre Courtois, Charles Figuieres and Chloe Mulier
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Chloe Mulier: UMR Innovation - Innovation et Développement dans l'Agriculture et l'Alimentation - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - Montpellier SupAgro - Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier

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Abstract: Effcient biodiversity management strategies aim to allocate conservation efforts so as to maximize diversity in ecological systems. Toward this end, dening a diversity criterion is an important but challenging task, as several different indices can be used as biodiversity measures. This paper elicits and compares two criteria for biodiversity conservation based on indices stemming from different disciplines: Weitzman's index in economics and Rao's index in ecology. These indices use different approaches to combine information about measures of (1) the probability distributions of the species that are present in an ecosystem (i.e. survival probabilities) and (2) the degree of dissimilarity between these species. As an important step toward in situ conservation criteria, we add to these elements information about (3) the ecological interactions that take place between species. Considering a simple three-species ecosystem, we show that criterion choice has palpable policy implications, as it can sometimes lead to divergent management recommendations. We disentangle the roles played by elements (1), (2) and (3) in the ranking outcomes, which allows us to highlight several specificities of the two criteria. An important result is that, other things being equal, Weitzman's in situ ranking tends to favor robust species that are least concerned with extinction, while Rao's in situ ranking generally gives priority to more vulnerable species that are closer to extinction.

Keywords: Species prioritization criteria; Public policy; Ecological interactions; Biodiversity indices; Conservation management strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02090938v1
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Published in Ecological Economics, 2019, 159, pp.133--147. ⟨10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.027⟩

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Related works:
Journal Article: A Tale of Two Diversities (2019)
Working Paper: A Tale of Two Diversities (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02090938

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.027

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