Rapid Assessment of Ecosystem Service Co-Benefits of Biodiversity Priority Areas in Madagascar

Abstract

The importance of ecosystems for supporting human well-being is increasingly recognized by both the conservation and development sectors. Our ability to conserve ecosystems that people rely on is often limited by a lack of spatially explicit data on the location and distribution of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits provided by nature to people. Thus there is a need to map ES to guide conservation investments, to ensure these co-benefits are maintained. To target conservation investments most effectively, ES assessments must be rigorous enough to support conservation planning, rapid enough to respond to decision-making timelines, and often must rely on existing data. We developed a framework for rapid spatial assessment of ES that relies on expert and stakeholder consultation, available data, and spatial analyses in order to rapidly identify sites providing multiple benefits. We applied the framework in Madagascar, a country with globally significant biodiversity and a high level of human dependence on ecosystems. Our objective was to identify the ES co-benefits of biodiversity priority areas in order to guide the investment strategy of a global conservation fund. We assessed key provisioning (fisheries, hunting and non-timber forest products, and water for domestic use, agriculture, and hydropower), regulating (climate mitigation, flood risk reduction and coastal protection), and cultural (nature tourism) ES. We also conducted multi-criteria analyses to identify sites providing multiple benefits. While our approach has limitations, including the reliance on proximity-based indicators for several ES, the results were useful for targeting conservation investments by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Because our approach relies on available data, standardized methods for linking ES provision to ES use, and expert validation, it has the potential to quickly guide conservation planning and investment decisions in other data-poor regions.

Fig 1. Steps for rapid ES assessment for site prioritization.

Fig 2. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) in Madagascar.

Fig 3. Importance of KBAs for hunting and non-timber forest products (left), and small-scale fisheries (right).

Fig 4. Importance of KBAs for fresh water for domestic use (left), and agriculture (right).

Fig 5. Forest carbon density (tons carbon per hectare) overlaid with KBAs (left); total forest carbon per KBA (tons C) (right).

Fig 6. Results from multi-criteria analysis 1 (MCA1, left) and MCA2 (right).

MCA1 includes carbon, hunting and non-timber forest products, fresh water, and nature tourism; MCA2 includes the same variables with the exception of carbon.

Fig 7. Final CEPF priority sites and other Key Biodiversity Areas.

Sites in the eastern humid forests were not prioritized by CEPF, as these sites already have some level of conservation investment.

Fig 8. CEPF priority sites and relative importance for freshwater for agriculture (left) and local fisheries (right).