Climate change deflecting attention from biodiversity loss

Recent high levels of media coverage for climate change may have deflected attention and funding from biodiversity loss, colleagues from the Kent Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology suggest. In a new paper they recommend that, to prevent biodiversity from becoming a declining priority, conservationists need to leverage the importance of climate change to obtain more funds and draw attention to other research areas such as biodiversity conservation.

For the study, the team conducted a content analysis of newspaper coverage in four US broadsheets (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today) and four UK broadsheets (the Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and the Financial Times). Academic peer-reviewed coverage and project funding by the World Bank and National Science Foundation were also examined.

Among their findings they discovered that:

• Press attention devoted to biodiversity has remained stable since 1990, but the proportion of climate change reports rose before 2007 and has stayed substantially higher than biodiversity since 2005.
• In scientific journals, papers on biodiversity loss and conservation have increased at a steady pace, but publication of papers on climate change accelerated markedly around 2006 and overtook them
• Funding by the World Bank shows no evident change over the past 20 years, with climate change projects funded at a much greater rate than biodiversity projects. The US National Science Foundation's investments directed toward climate change research have increased substantially since 1987, but biodiversity expenditures have increased much less and have held steady since 2004.

The researchers recommend that, given that many human influences are driving both climate change and biodiversity loss, conservationists should aim for win-win solutions such as the United Nations program REDD+ (an extension of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation program).

The objective of REDD+ is not just to secure carbon storage but also to create additional cobenefits for local communities and biodiversity. Such mechanisms avoid the artificial prioritization of one particular environmental threat over another, providing unifying approaches that can be promoted to different stakeholders