Flexible Climate Adaptation Can Substantially Reduce Conservation Costs and Mitigate Risk

Climate change will have profound and unexpected impacts on biodiversity in the future. These impacts could potentially be mitigated through adaptive and responsive conservation planning, but it remains unclear how adaptation opportunities can be harnessed through careful planning of present-day activities. Here, we show that the use of flexible conservation strategies that exploit opportunities for climate adaptation can mitigate climate risks without increasing total conservation costs. We estimate the value of allowing flexible delays of conservation investments for protecting habitats of the iconic and threatened koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in eastern Australia. Conservation strategies that have no option to strategically delay investments face significant trade-offs between minimizing conservation costs and reducing risks in conservation outcomes. These trade-offs are substantially mitigated by flexible strategies that strategically delay investments into the future when the effects of climate change are likely to be better understood. Strategic delays are shown to mitigate climate risks in inflexible conservation strategies without even increasing conservation costs. These results show that conservation planning that strategically allocates present-day conservation resources while also allowing the flexibility to shift these resources in the future is much more likely to achieve cost-effective conservation outcomes in the face of uncertain climate change impacts.