InvaCost

Organizing Committee:

• Franck Courchamp

Program Manager: Francesca Sconfienza

The development of InvaCost meets a growing need for a better understanding of the consequences of biological invasions. Indeed, there is a wide gap between the ecological, economic and health impacts of invasions and their perception by the public and by decision-makers, for whom a clear lack of awareness leads to a lack of support and action. It seemed to us that such a database, combined with a methodology for standardizing costs so that they could be compiled and compared, offered the opportunity to finally communicate with a single metric. As with climate change and its degree of warming, if some of the impacts could be the subject of quantitative studies, this would provide stakeholders with a key to understanding this process of global change, and those involved in preserving biodiversity with a solid argument to convince them to take more action. What's more, an economically-based metric, like a currency, is (unfortunately) more likely to attract the interest of politicians and decision-makers, and therefore (fortunately) more likely to draw attention to other impacts (ecological and health). Since its official creation at the end of 2019, the consortium of experts working on InvaCost has published 70 scientific papers, with many more in the pipeline.