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Recent calls to direct conservation funding to the world's biodiversity hotspots may be bad investment advice
The numbers are chilling. Every year tropical forests covering an area the size of Poland are destroyed. With them, perhaps ten thousand species are wiped out annually, most before they can be so much as cataloged. Some liken the current calamity to the last episode of mass extinction-65 million years ago when a wayward asteroid killed off the dinosaurs along with about two-thirds of the species then in existence.
The rapid loss of tropical forests throughout the world and the widely recognized "biodiversity crisis" have spurred various nongovernmental conservation organizations and international agencies to develop strategies for protecting natural habitats. But the scale of the crisis is so daunting that conservationists widely accept the need for some sort of triage, whereby limited funds go to the places where the greatest good can be done. Experts have explored various ways to set priorities, and almost without exception, rainforests get top billing. The reason is simple: These tropical ecosystems harbor more unique species than any other habitat or place. Identifying and protecting such "biodiversity hotspots" has thus become the reigning scientific paradigm among conservationists.
Biodiversity hotspots are regions with unusually high concentrations of endemic species (species that are found nowhere else on Earth) that also have suffered severe habitat destruction. Norman Myers, an environmentalist affiliated with the University of Oxford, first coined this term in a scholarly paper he wrote in 1988. Now, virtually every textbook on conservation biology contains a map of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Although lush tropical rainforests first leap to mind, oceanic islands and Mediterranean ecosystems such as those found in California, South Africa and Australia are also considered hotspots because they, too, show exceptionally high rates of plant endemism.
The hotspot concept has been extremely effective at directing international funding and philanthropy. Given this success, we think it worth pausing to examine the scientific foundation of this conservation strategy and to consider what the consequences of this concept may be for the huge expanses of the planet that it leaves out in the cold-places we might dub biodiversity "coldspots."
Does it make scientific sense to downplay the world's steppes, the Serengeti, the wild Arctic and...