Almost 300,000€ is what the Doñana fire cost in terms of biodiversity, according to an estimate done by a University of Cordoba research group.
Almost 300,000€ is what the Doñana fire cost in terms of biodiversity, according to an estimate done by a University of Cordoba research group. The fire occurred in 2017 and destroyed about 8,500 hectares, most of which were part of Doñana National Park, home to a number of emblematic species. The fire destroyed the habitat of a group of Iberian lynxes, one of the most symbolic endangered species on the Iberian Peninsula. These lynxes had to escape and move to another home. The breeding grounds for the Iberian lynxes in El Acebuche also had to evacuate its animals, one of which, a female, died from stress endured during the capture and transport.
“When calculating financial losses from a fire, the cost of the impact on species that live there is never taken into account,” says Ricardo Zamora, who along with Juan Ramón Molina and Francisco Rodríguez y Silva from the Forestry Engineering Department, performed this research. “It was necessary to assign value to biodiversity and to do so, it was important to provide figures,” he declares.
The research team wanted to insist on the importance of biodiversity by calculating the financial cost of the effects of forest fires on emblematic species, something that had not been done before in Europe. The research focused on two different 2017 fires: one in Doñana, and one in Segura, in which 830 hectares burned. It is challenging to measure the value of the biodiversity of a forest as a whole, hence, they decided to choose some emblematic Mediterranean species, such as the Iberian Lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle.
The research was performed via two avenues. The first took into account money invested in conservation programs and species protection programs. The second performed surveys in order to estimate the amount that citizens were willing to pay to protect emblematic species. “Society is always willing to pay more to conserve its emblematic species even though the difference is much greater, for example, in the case of the Spanish imperial eagle compared to the case of the Iberian lynx,” says Juan Ramón Molina.
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Image Credit: University of Córdoba
