Biodiversity Conservation Planning For Sustainability: Linking Local, Regional And Global Conservation Efforts

Abstract

Limited resources and competing demands of society mean trade-offs are required in biodiversity planning. Areas selected for biodiversity protection should have a high enough 'complementarity' value (marginal gain in biodiversity protection) to compensate for any corresponding opportunity cost of conservation. This promotes 'regional sustainability' - the degree to which the region has achieved its capacity for finding a balance among competing needs of society. Trade-offs may be achieved more effectively when production lands are credited in the allocation process to at least partial protection of biodiversity, using probabilistic strategies for expressing local biodiversity persistence, Tradeoffs scenarios help in understanding the implications of change - for example, whether a land use allocation implies that the best trade-offs curve for the region is now much worse. In recent scenarios analysis for Papua New Guinea (PNG), achieving a biodiversity protection target with minimum opportunity cost was important, given that biodiversity values overlap with forestry production values, and high forgone forestry opportunities mean significant losses to land owners and the government. The PNG study demonstrates that biodiversity complementarity is not just about selecting a set of priority protected areas, but about a new 'biodiversity economics' relating to offsets, levies, subsidies, and incentives. Ongoing scenarios development in PNG concerns biodiversity targets, land use constraints, timber plans, population issues, and the scope for applying new economic instruments. Similar trade-offs scenarios are relevant to two new international initiatives, the Millennium Assessment and the Critical Ecosystems or hotspots program. In these contexts, trade-offs can provide a natural linkage between local, regional and global planning levels.