Abstract
We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from public land conservation in the state of Minnesota, USA. We use a spatially-explicit modeling tool, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to estimate how changes in land use and land cover (LULC), including public land acquisitions for conservation, influence the joint provision and value of multiple ecosystem services. We calculate the ROI of a public conservation acquisition as the ratio of the present value of ecosystem services generated by the conservation to the cost of the conservation. For the land scenarios analyzed, carbon sequestration services generated the greatest benefits followed by water quality improvements and recreation opportunities. We found ROI values ranged from 0.21 to 5.28 depending on assumptions about future land use change, service values, and discount rate. Our study suggests conservation is a good investment as long as investments are targeted to areas with low land costs and high service values.
Highlights
The rapid decline of natural ecosystems around the world has spurred governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and citizens to acquire some of the remaining natural areas for conservation in order to sustain their unique sets of benefits and intrinsic values
In [30], the estimated model (1) is used in conjunction with higher crop prices to simulate the amount of land that changes from j to use k in each county for eleven 5-year time steps starting with the 1997 Natural Resources Inventory (NRI) county-level land use and land cover (LULC) map given systematically high crop prices
We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from conservation acquisitions by the state of Minnesota from 1989 to 2008 by considering the joint provision of multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity, the cost of the acquisition and restoration, and the development threat
Summary
The rapid decline of natural ecosystems around the world has spurred governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and citizens to acquire some of the remaining natural areas for conservation in order to sustain their unique sets of benefits and intrinsic values. The inner loop of the model calculates the present monetary value of the additional ecosystem services generated up to 2052 on a Minnesota landscape that includes 1989 to 2008 (hereinafter called post-1988) public conservation.
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