Managing risk and uncertainty in systematic conservation planning with insufficient information

Abstract

Recent advances in systematic conservation planning make use of modern portfolio theory (MPT)—a framework to construct and select optimal allocation of assets—to address the challenges posed by climate change uncertainty. However, these methods are difficult to implement for fine-scale conservation planning when the information on future climate scenarios is insufficient. Insufficient information makes the estimators of the key inputs in the optimisation procedure unreliable leading to technical problems for the construction of optimal asset allocation. We identify three statistical methods—constant correlation model, the Ledoit–Wolf approach and the weighted non-negative least-squares appro..