Abstract
Uniting diverse stakeholders through communication, education or building a collaborative ‘common vision’ for biodiversity management is a recommended approach for enabling effective conservation in regions with multiple uses. However, socially focused strategies such as building a collaborative vision can require sharing scarce resources (time and financial resources) with the on-ground management actions needed to achieve conservation outcomes. Here we adapt current prioritisation tools to predict the likely return on the financial investment of building a stakeholder-led vision along with a portfolio of on-ground management strategies. Our approach brings together and analyses expert knowledge to estimate the cost-effectiveness of a common vision strategy and on-ground management strategies, before any investments in these strategies are made. We test our approach in an intensively-used Australian biodiversity hotspot with 179 threatened or at-risk species. Experts predicted that an effective stakeholder vision for the region would have a relatively low cost and would significantly increase the feasibility of on-ground management strategies. As a result, our analysis indicates that a common vision is likely to be a cost-effective investment, increasing the expected persistence of threatened species in the region by 9 to 52%, depending upon the strategies implemented. Our approach can provide the maximum budget that is worth investing in building a common vision or another socially focused strategy for building support for on-ground conservation actions. The approach can assist with decisions about whether and how to allocate scarce resources amongst social and ecological actions for biodiversity conservation in other regions worldwide.
Highlights
More than 75% of the planet’s terrestrial ecosystems have been altered by human activities since the industrial revolution [1]
The participants described the core characteristics of this common vision as: to be driven by local stakeholders from all sectors, to form a working group that could help mobilise key experts, with a participatory, bottom-up leadership style; all stakeholders should have a fair say in the vision regardless of their economic contribution to the region; and stakeholders need to compromise to minimize negative impacts across all stakeholders (S2 Table)
A common vision for biodiversity conservation in effect assuming that the key costs are in forming the relevant collaboration rather than in reaching consensus for additional strategies
Summary
More than 75% of the planet’s terrestrial ecosystems have been altered by human activities since the industrial revolution [1]. Finding solutions to avoid further losses of ecosystems and native species is more difficult in regions with multiple land-use activities because challenges such as insufficient ongoing resources for long-term management implementation, local stakeholders not supporting top-down management decisions, inadequate information for making management decisions and conflicts between land-use for development, production and nature conservation may be more acute [4,5,6]. A common or shared vision, developed through stakeholder collaboration, describes an attractive or acceptable future to the collective of people involved in its development [10]. Environmentally-oriented common visions have been built in different parts of the world in attempts to reconcile diverse values, set shared goals, balance competing interests and identify pathways for implementing on-ground strategies for managing regional assets, including biodiversity [16]
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