Agenda, Volume 14, Number 2, 2007, pages 157-170 Conserving Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change Harry Clarke ost climate scientists accept that environmentally-damaging, anthropogenic, global warming has been a reality over the past century and that, unless societies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, warming will become an increasingly serious global concern. Even with active greenhouse gas management policies in place it is also widely agreed that global warming will continue because of lags in climate generation. This has led to policies being developed which promote adaptation to the effects of global warming as it is expected to unfold. These policies accept that future global warming will be a reality and seek to learn to live with it. One class of adaptation strategies, of concern to Australia, relate to biodiversity resources. Biodiversity has intrinsic value if citizens value species and habitats that exist per se. Biodiversity also has instrumental value in improving the quality of life of citizens who consume the direct service flows (such as aesthetic values) stemming from it and, indirectly, through its role in ensuring a reliable supply of agricultural, water resource and other outputs. Biodiversity resources are already being lost because of human land use impacts such as land clearing and urbanisation. Climate change can be expected to exacerbate the rate of such losses in the sense that: Climate change is projected to affect individual organisms, populations, species distributions, and ecosystem conservation and function both directly (for example, through increases in temperature and changes in precipitation and in the case of marine and coastal ecosystems also changes in sea level and storm surges) and indirectly (for example, through climate changing the intensity and frequency of disturbances such as wildfires). Processes such as habitat loss, modification and fragmentation, and the introduction of non-native species will affect the impacts of climate change. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2002:1). This paper shows how to determine economically efficient public policies to reduce the impact of climate change on the range and richness of Australian biodiversity. It emphasises issues of limiting species extinctions to advance the community's demands for biodiversity conservation. Avoiding extinctions alone is, however, a narrow conservation perspective. More generally we think of policies to improve the resilience of Australian biodiversity as a whole to climate change, including the facilitation of species relocations and the prevention of unsought species invasions. Harry Clarke is Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Finance, La Trobe University. M