Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Kourantidou, M., Cuthbert, R. N., Haubrock, P. J., Novoa, A., Taylor, N. G., Leroy, B., Capinha, C., Renault, D., Angulo, E., Diagne, C., & Courchamp, F. Economic costs of invasive alien species in the Mediterranean basin. Neobiota, 67, (2021): 427–458, https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.67.58926.
Description:
nvasive alien species (IAS) negatively impact the environment and undermine human well-being, often resulting in considerable economic costs. The Mediterranean basin is a culturally, socially and economically diverse region, harbouring many IAS that threaten economic and societal integrity in multiple ways. This paper is the first attempt to collectively quantify the reported economic costs of IAS in the Mediterranean basin, across a range of taxonomic, temporal and spatial descriptors. We identify correlates of costs from invasion damages and management expenditures among key socioeconomic variables, and determine network structures that link countries and invasive taxonomic groups. The total reported invasion costs in the Mediterranean basin amounted to $27.3 billion, or $3.6 billion when only realised costs were considered, and were found to have occurred over the last three decades. Our understanding of costs of invasions in the Mediterranean was largely limited to a few, primarily western European countries and to terrestrial ecosystems, despite the known presence of numerous high-impact aquatic invasive taxa. The vast majority of costs were attributed to damages or losses from invasions ($25.2 billion) and were mostly driven by France, Spain and to a lesser extent Italy and Libya, with significantly fewer costs attributed to management expenditure ($1.7 billion). Overall, invasion costs increased through time, with average annual costs between 1990 and 2017 estimated at $975.5 million. The lack of information from a large proportion of Mediterranean countries, reflected in the spatial and taxonomic connectivity analysis and the relationship of costs with socioeconomic variables, highlights the limits of the available data and the research effort needed to improve a collective understanding of the different facets of the costs of biological invasions. Our analysis of the reported costs associated with invasions in the Mediterranean sheds light on key knowledge gaps and provides a baseline for a Mediterranean-centric approach towards building policies and designing coordinated responses. In turn, these could help reach socially desirable outcomes and efficient use of resources invested in invasive species research and management.
Description:
The authors acknowledge the French National Research Agency (ANR-14-CE02-0021) and the BNP-Paribas Foundation Climate Initiative for funding the InvaCost project that allowed the construction of the InvaCost database. The present work was conducted following a workshop funded by the AXA Research Fund Chair of Invasion Biology and is part of the AlienScenarios project funded by BiodivERsA and Belmont-Forum call 2018 on biodiversity scenarios. Funds for EA and LBM contracts come from the AXA Research Fund Chair of Invasion Biology. CD was funded by the BiodivERsA-Belmont Forum Project “Alien Scenarios” (BMBF/PT DLR 01LC1807C). PJH acknowledges COVID-19 and the strict but somewhat nonsensical rules from his affiliation that forced him to not go to NEOBIOTA2020, giving him much more time to work on this manuscript. RNC is funded through a Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. CC was supported by Portuguese National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (CEECIND/02037/2017; UIDB/00295/2020 and IDP/00295/2020). DR thanks InEE-CNRS who supports the network GdR 3647 ‘Invasions Biologiques’, and BiodivERsA who supported the project ‘ASICS’ via the cofund call 2019-2020 ‘Biodiversity and Climate Change’. AN acknowledges funding from EXPRO grant no. 19-28807X (Czech Science Foundation) and long-term research development project RVO 67985939 (Czech Academy of Sciences).
Keywords:
Geographic connectivity
;
InvaCost
;
Monetary impacts
;
Non-indigenous species
;
Resource losses
;
Socioeconomic dimensions
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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