Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity

Abstract

A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. We describe how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe patterns of biodiversity and how the pattern depends on the form(s) of biodiversity investigated. While we recognize examples where there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic status and biodiversity, we describe numerous examples where either opposite patterns or no clear relationship between wealth and biodiversity is found. We propose an alternate framework, the POSE framework, that examines the Power, Objectives, mediating Socio-ecological context, and Effort of specific actors and how those may influence biodiversity. The mediating socio-ecological context includes everything from biophysical limitations to historical context and the actions of other actors. Further, it is important to understand how and to what degree we expect the actor's actions to influence biodiversity in order to design studies that are able to detect these shifts in biodiversity. We contend that complicating our analysis to focus more on power generally, rather than socioeconomic status specifically, as well as the specific objectives of actors of interest within their socio-ecological context offers a more flexible approach that can be applied in a wider range of socio-ecological contexts and allows for more directed policy interventions.