Journal article
Treatment of uncertainty in conservation under climate change
H Kujala, MA Burgman, A Moilanen
Conservation Letters | Published : 2013
Abstract
Climate change is an important threat to biodiversity globally, but there are major uncertainties associated with its magnitude and ecological consequences. Here, we investigate how three major classes of uncertainty, linguistic uncertainty, epistemic uncertainty (uncertainty about facts), and human decision uncertainty, have been accounted for in scientific literature about climate change. Some sources of uncertainty are poorly characterized and epistemic uncertainty is much more commonly treated than linguistic or human decision uncertainty. Furthermore, we show that linguistic and human decision uncertainties are relatively better treated in the literature on sociopolitics or economics th..
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Awarded by European Commission
Funding Acknowledgements
A.M. and H. K. thank the Academy of Finland centre of excellence programme 2006-2011. A. M. acknowledges the ERC-StG project GEDA (grant 260393) and H. K. acknowledges the EU-FP7 RESPONSES-244092 and LUOVA Graduate School for financial support. We thank A. Kukkala and J. Kuustera for assistance with the compilation of the literature database. Our sincere thanks to A. Arponen, M. Cabeza, A. Cameron, Y.E. Chee, E. Di Minin, J. Eklund, R. Garcia, J. Kool, J. Laitila, J. Leathwick, J. Lehtomaki, C. MacAlpine, M. Maron, L. Meller, F. Montesino Pouzols, N. Strange, C. D. Thomas, and L. Zupan for their assistance on the strategy evaluation. We also thank four anonymous referees for their comments on earlier versions of this work.