Moving the Goalposts: Possible Effects of Changes in Opportunity Costs on Conservation Triage

The resources required to halt biodiversity declines are estimated to be many times more than current investment, underpinning calls to increase financial support for conservation, and to develop methods for allocating funds more efficiently (McCarthy et al., 2012; McDonald et al., 2015). Conservation triage is an important part of the latter strategy, with proponents arguing that by explicitly prioritizing resources toward targets (e.g., particular species or populations) identified as generating the greatest benefits for a given investment, triage avoids using resources on cases in which conservation effort is unlikely to make a difference (i.e., improvement is unlikely or is near-certain irrespective of investment; Bottrill et al., 2008; Schneider et al., 2010; Gerber, 2016). However, triage has been criticized on several grounds, such as potentially signaling to decision-makers that some extinctions or population losses are acceptable, and the scientific, ethical, and practical arguments have been debated without reaching clear consensus (Bottrill et al., 2008; Jachowski and Kesler, 2008; Parr et al., 2008). Our primary aim here is not to revisit these arguments, but to highlight an additional issue—the potential for substantial, unforeseen changes in the future costs of conservation—and investigate how this issue might affect triage and non-triage approaches.