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Climate and land‐use change pose unprecedented threats to ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide. To help mitigate the climate crisis, restoration is a rapidly growing industry used to offset carbon emissions. The most common approach is to plant fast‐growing monocultures with the aim of sequestering as much carbon as possible in the shortest time. However, there has been little economic analysis of planting options that explicitly address short and long‐term ecological risks such as fire, disease, and environmental change. Here we develop a method for quantifying ecological risks from fire to sequestration investments and show how these risks can be factored into an analysis of long‐term financial returns relative to opportunity costs. In the case study presented, we find that the apparent advantage of fast‐growing monoculture plantations is likely to be outweighed by the long‐term fire risks to the carbon stored in them. Our analytical framework provides a widely applicable approach to comparing planting options against each other and other land uses, considering key uncertainties. With climate change already manifesting through extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and shifting wildlife populations, our framework can be used to make informed decisions about the best solutions to increase carbon sequestration, reduce ecological risks, and reduce climate impacts with greater certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision science emphasizes necessary elements required for robust decision‐making. By incorporating decision science principles, frameworks, and tools, it has been demonstrated that decision‐makers can increase the chances of achieving conservation aims. Setting measurable objectives, clearly documenting assumptions about the impact of available actions on a specific threat or problem, explicitly considering constraints, exploring and characterizing uncertainty, and structured deliberation on trade‐offs have been identified as key elements of successful decision‐making. We quantify the extent to which these five elements were utilized in published examples of decision making in conservation in both academic and conservation practice between 2009 and 2018. We found that less than 50% of identified examples included all five elements, with differences in the degree of decision science applied across five commonly used decision support approaches: adaptive management (AM), systematic conservation planning (SCP), structured decision making (SDM), multi‐criteria decision analysis, and cost‐effectiveness analysis. Example applications that utilized the SDM framework were limited in numbers but used on average more than 50% of the five key elements we considered. Although SCP and AM constituted the majority of examples, they were more prevalent in academic studies rather than management applications. SCP and AM examples were widespread in protected area planning, threat abatement, and restoration. Strong geographic bias exists in documented conservation activities that deploy all five decision science elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offsetting policies have increased worldwide, utilizing a range of biodiversity metrics to compensate for development impacts. We conducted a global analysis of offset legislation by reviewing policies from 108 countries, which have voluntary offsets, or which require offsets by law. We sought to understand how well biodiversity metrics and offset currencies are documented in current policies. Where biodiversity metrics are documented we aimed to understand how metrics were scored, combined, and multiplied to create offset currencies. We found only 22 jurisdictions (from 14 countries) had guidelines documenting how biodiversity should be assessed during offsetting, representing a significant gap in the guidance available for offsets. Of the 22 guidelines, 14 (63%) documented use of aggregated currencies, eight (23%) did not aggregate biodiversity metrics into a single currency, and three (17%) did not specify either approach. Habitat type and condition, as well as area, were widely recommended across policies (>50%). Where species‐level metrics were considered, guidelines generally focused on habitat distributions rather than abundance or population metrics. The lack of consistent and clear guidance about how biodiversity should be measured in offsets reduces our ability to determine the effectiveness of offsets in compensating for development impacts long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]