气候变化领域集成服务门户

This paper addresses management challenges associated with conserving endangered wildlife facing multiple threats from illegal poaching, habitat encroachment, and climate and land-use change-induced flooding. While poaching and encroachment challenges in conservation parks are of immediate nature, climate-related risks exist in the long term. The park manager faces a utility function that includes as its arguments local community's incomes, benefits to the larger society from preserving threatened species and the financial costs of monitoring and land-use change efforts. Using the case of single-horned rhinos in the Kaziranga National Park, India, an optimal mix of monitoring and land-use changes is designed in presence of tradeoffs between short- and long-term management efforts. As monitoring only addresses immediate challenges associated with poaching and encroachment, long-term climatic risks remain ignored. Land-use management offers risk-protection as well as risk-insurance benefits with respect to climate change-induced flooding of the park.