Integrating natural disasters into protected area designing for global primate conservation under climate change

Abstract

Disaster risk reduction, an essential function of protected areas (PAs), has been generally overlooked in PA design. Using primates as a model, we designed a disaster risk index (DRI) to measure the disaster sensitivity of primate species. High-conservation-need (HCN) areas were identified by both their richness and number of threatened primate species. We also constructed high-disaster-risk (HDR) areas and climate-sensitive (CS) areas based on a disaster risk assessment and temperature change under climate change. We overlaid HCN and HDR areas to obtain HDR-HCN areas. We defined species conservation targets as the percent of each species’ range that should be effectively conserved using “Zonation”. Landslides had the highest DRI (1.43 ± 0.88), but have been overlooked in previous studies. PA coverage in HDR-HCN (30 %) areas was similar to that in HCN areas (28 %), indicating that current PA design fails to account for disaster risk reduction. About 50 % of the HDR-HCN areas overlapped with CS areas. Presently, 43 % of primate species meet their conservation targets. Fifty-seven of primate species would meet their conservation targets and 67 % of primates could benefit from PA expansion if HDR-HCN areas are fully incorporated into PAs. Increasing PA coverage in HDR-HCN areas is essential to achieving both primate conservation and disaster risk reduction. The study calls for integrating disaster risk reduction into PA design guidelines, particularly in regions like the western Amazon, and recommends flexible conservation approaches in other areas.

Keywords

Natural disasters / Landslides / Conservation target / Primate conservation

Data and materials availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary materials. We also uploaded the disaster maps to figshare (doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.27312066).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Li Yang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Weiying Xu: Writing – original draft, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Tao Chen: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Formal analysis. Yuxuan Fan: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Formal analysis. Pengfei Fan: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Funding acquisition, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank Y. J. Zhou for her help in figure design. This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2022YFF1301500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 32000352, 32171485, and 32371741), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2021A1515010968), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (Grant No. 23lgzy002).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.09.006.

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