Environmental and Social Risks to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health—A Bottom-Up, Resource-Focused Assessment Framework
Environmental and Social Risks to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health—A Bottom-Up, Resource-Focused Assessment Framework
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DOI：
10.3390/earth2030026
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发表时间：
2021-07
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Pielke;J. Adegoke;F. Hossain;D. Niyogi
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作者：
R. Pielke;J. Adegoke;F. Hossain;D. Niyogi
人类干预气候系统的风险正在引起人们对个别物种和生态系统健康和复原力的关注。一种主要的方法是使用全球气候模型来预测未来几十年的气候变化，然后缩小这些信息的范围，以评估对植物群落、动物栖息地、农业和城市生态系统以及地球生命系统其他部分的影响。然而，要在这种自上而下、结果脆弱的方法中对这些系统的威胁进行有力的评估，需要熟练地预测和反映区域和地方气候过程的变化，而这一点尚未令人满意地实现。此外，对生物多样性和生态系统功能的威胁，例如来自入侵物种的威胁，总体上没有充分纳入评估。我们讨论了一个建立在自下而上脆弱性概念基础上的补充评估框架，该概念要求确定包括极端事件在内的对环境的主要人类和自然压力，以及这些压力之间的相互作用。在确定这些强制因素和相互作用之后，可以将每个问题的相对风险与其他风险或强制因素进行比较，以便采取最佳的缓解/适应战略。与主要基于数十年全球和区域气候模型预测的结果脆弱性方法相比，这一框架是评估风险的一种更具包容性的方法，包括气候变异性以及较长期的自然和人为驱动的变化。因此，我们得出结论，单靠自上而下的方法是过时的，因为它不足以有力地评估对生物多样性和生态系统功能的风险。相比之下，自下而上的综合方法是可行的，更符合评估和保育界的需要。我们论文的一个关键信息是强调需要考虑耦合反馈，因为地球是一个动态交互系统。这不仅应该在模型结构中这样做，而且在其应用和后续分析中也应该这样做。我们认识到，社会正在朝着这个目标前进，我们敦促加快步伐。
Risks from human intervention in the climate system are raising concerns with respect to individual species and ecosystem health and resiliency. A dominant approach uses global climate models to predict changes in climate in the coming decades and then to downscale this information to assess impacts to plant communities, animal habitats, agricultural and urban ecosystems, and other parts of the Earth’s life system. To achieve robust assessments of the threats to these systems in this top-down, outcome vulnerability approach, however, requires skillful prediction, and representation of changes in regional and local climate processes, which has not yet been satisfactorily achieved. Moreover, threats to biodiversity and ecosystem function, such as from invasive species, are in general, not adequately included in the assessments. We discuss a complementary assessment framework that builds on a bottom-up vulnerability concept that requires the determination of the major human and natural forcings on the environment including extreme events, and the interactions between these forcings. After these forcings and interactions are identified, then the relative risks of each issue can be compared with other risks or forcings in order to adopt optimal mitigation/adaptation strategies. This framework is a more inclusive way of assessing risks, including climate variability and longer-term natural and anthropogenic-driven change, than the outcome vulnerability approach which is mainly based on multi-decadal global and regional climate model predictions. We therefore conclude that the top-down approach alone is outmoded as it is inadequate for robustly assessing risks to biodiversity and ecosystem function. In contrast the bottom-up, integrative approach is feasible and much more in line with the needs of the assessment and conservation community. A key message of our paper is to emphasize the need to consider coupled feedbacks since the Earth is a dynamically interactive system. This should be done not just in the model structure, but also in its application and subsequent analyses. We recognize that the community is moving toward that goal and we urge an accelerated pace.