Savanna fire management can generate enough carbon revenue to help restore Africa's rangelands and fill protected area funding gaps

Many savanna-dependent species in Africa including large herbivores and apex predators are at increasing risk of extinction. Achieving effective management of protected areas (PAs) in Africa where lions live will cost an estimated US$>1–2 billion/year in new funding. We explore the potential for fire-management-based carbon financing programs to fill this funding gap and benefit degrading savanna ecosystems. We demonstrate how introducing early dry season fire management programs could produce potential carbon revenues (PCRs) from either a single carbon financing method (avoided emissions) or from multiple sequestration methods ranging from US$ 59.6–655.9 million/year (at US$5/ton) or US$ 155.0 million/year to US$1.7 billion/year (at US$ 13/ton). We highlight variable but significant PCRs for savanna PAs from US$ 1.5–44.4 million/year per PA. We suggest investing in fire management programs to jump-start the United Nations Decade of Ecological Restoration to help restore degraded African savannas and conserve imperiled keystone herbivores and apex predators.https://www.cell.com/one-earth/homeam2022Zoology and Entomolog

A return-on-investment framework to identify conservation priorities in Africa

Environmental conservation activities must continue to become more efficient and effective, especially in Africa where development and population growth pressures continue to escalate. Recently, prioritization of conservation resources has focused on explicitly incorporating the economic costs of conservation along with better defining the outcomes of these expenditures. We demonstrate how new global and continental data that spans social, economic, and ecological sectors creates an opportunity to incorporate return-on-investment (ROI) principles into conservation priority setting for Africa. We suggest that combining conservation priorities that factor in biodiversity value, habitat quality, and conservation management investments across terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal marine environments provides a new lens for setting global conservation priorities. Using this approach we identified seven regions capturing interior and coastal resources that also have high ROI values that support further investment. We illustrate how spatially explicit, yet flexible ROI analysis can help to better address uncertainty, risk, and opportunities for conservation, while making values that guide prioritization more transparent. In one case the results of this prioritization process were used to support new conservation investments. Acknowledging a clear research need to improve cost information, we propose that adopting a flexible ROI framework to set conservation priorities in Africa has multiple potential benefits

Resource management in a changing and uncertain climate

Climate change is altering ecological systems throughout the world. Managing these systems in a way that ignores climate change will likely fail to meet management objectives. The uncertainty in projected climate-change impacts is one of the greatest challenges facing managers attempting to address global change. In order to select successful management strategies, managers need to understand the uncertainty inherent in projected climate impacts and how these uncertainties affect the outcomes of management activities. Perhaps the most important tool for managing ecological systems in the face of climate change is active adaptive management, in which systems are closely monitored and management strategies are altered to address expected and ongoing changes. Here, we discuss the uncertainty inherent in different types of data on potential climate impacts and explore climate projections and potential management responses at three sites in North America. The Central Valley of California, the headwaters of the Klamath River in Oregon, and the barrier islands and sounds of North Carolina each face a different set of challenges with respect to climate change. Using these three sites, we provide specific examples of how managers are already beginning to address the threat of climate change in the face of varying levels of uncertainty. © The Ecological Society of America