Climate change and the cost-effective governance mode for biodiversity conservation

Climate change poses a key challenge for biodiversity conservation. In particular, conservation agencies have to spatially allocate conservation measures in a way that enables species to move with climate change. Moreover, they can choose two main governance modes: (1) buy land to implement conservation measures themselves on their land, or (2) compensate landowners for voluntarily providing conservation measures on their land. We develop a dynamic, conceptual ecological-economic model to investigate the influence of changes in climatic parameters on the cost-effectiveness of these governance modes and specific patch selection strategies (price prioritization, species abundance prioritization, climate suitability prioritization, climate change direction prioritization). We identify five effects, which explain the cost-effectiveness performance of the combinations of governance mode and patch selection strategy, and find that their cost-effectiveness depends on climate parameters and is thus case-specific.