Integrating Biophysical and Economic Information to Guide Land Conservation Investments

نویسنده

  • Paul J. Ferraro
چکیده

Concerns over the effects of private land use on the supply of environmental amenities have led to an increasing global reliance on conservation contracting initiatives (Ferraro and Kiss 2002). The term “conservation contracting” describes the contractual transfer of payments from one party (e.g., government) to another (e.g., landowner) in exchange for land use practices that contribute to the supply of an environmental amenity. Such contracts include easements and short-term conservation leases. A key issue in the design of conservation contracting initiatives, as with any conservation policy, is how to integrate information about spatially variable biophysical and economic conditions into a cost-effective plan. Much of the previous work on targeting scarce conservation funds has focused on the conservation of biological diversity. Targeting approaches favored by biological scientists and conservationists emphasize the environmental amenities that a given land unit produces, while often ignoring the costs of acquiring those amenities. For example, Dobson et al. (1997), based on their finding that endangered species in the United States were concentrated spatially, suggest that conservationists should focus their efforts on a small number of geographic areas. In response, Ando et al. (1998) assert that variability in economic factors is just as important as ecological variability in efficient species conservation, specifically noting that an approach that considers both economic and ecological variability could cost less than one-sixth the cost of an approach considering only ecological variability. A similar debate has developed over targeting ecosystem conservation investments at the global scale (Mittermeir et al. 1998; Balmford et al. 2000). Other studies by

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تاریخ انتشار 2005