Can ecologists heat up the discussion on invasive species risk?

Ecologists predict that invasive species and global climate change will be two of the leading drivers of global biodiversity loss over the next century (Sala et al., 2000). Society, however, has responded to these two threats in a very uneven way; global climate change has become a major focus of public policy, while problems from invasive species remain poorly addressed. This discrepancy is emphasized by the Kyoto Protocol, which brought 160 nations together in 1997 to create a program for worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the fact that ecologists have recognized invasive species as a serious problem since the 1950s (Elton, 1958), there has been no international effort comparable to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their impacts. This discrepancy is also reflected at the national scale—this fiscal year the United States will spend close to $2 billion on climate change research (CCSP, 2004), while only $227 million is budgeted for invasive species research (NISC, 2005). In this editorial, we ask why ecologists have had so little success communicating the problems of invasive species to society, and offer some suggestions for how ecologists can be more effective at this in the future. Communicating the risks from invasive species is complicated. Each invasive species has different impacts, and there are many diverse vectors of introduction. In our experience, members of the general public are aware of a few specific examples of invasive species, but few people understand the global scale of vectors and impacts. In contrast, ecologists are