Identifying opportunities for private land conservation

Abstract

Privately owned lands are a battlefield for nature conservation. Native plants and animals are abundant on private land. So too are stocks of natural capital that provide both direct and indirect well-being benefits to society. However, these landscapes also provide valuable opportunities for developing communities and society. Private lands stimulate urban expansion and development, as well as industries like agriculture and mining. To promote environmental sustainability across privately owned landscapes, policymakers need to find ways to mediate how people and societies engage with their natural environment. Regardless of the means, private land conservation and land stewardship policies are now widely developed and implemented by governments and by land trusts to restore the balance between conflicting land use priorities.Encouraging the uptake and spread of private land conservation is now on the global and national policy agenda. However, to catalyse this movement, researchers and policymakers require a greater understanding of the mechanisms of adoption and the effectiveness of these actions. With this information in hand, policymakers can then inform the evidence-based and efficient spread of private land conservation initiatives. In this thesis, I investigate aspects of the design, uptake and effectiveness of privately protected areas. I am to identify their conservation outcomes and impacts, associated risks and future opportunities, which can inform potential pathways for privately protected area expansion. I use conservation covenants as a case study privately protected area legal instrument and Australia as a case study location.Considerable research effort has focused on how national reserve systems contribute to conservation outcomes. However, only a limited number of these assessments consider how a combination of government, privately and Indigenous protected areas within a reserve system affects its overall conservation outcome. In Chapter 2, I use compositional analysis to assess how different protected area governance types in Australia contribute towards the conservation outcomes of threatened ecosystems, with particular emphasis on the contribution of privately protected areas towards this objective. Identifying how different protected area governance types contribute to conserving threatened ecosystems can shed light on the potential conservation outcomes they are currently having, and how they may contribute towards conservation objectives in the future.Privately protected areas have emerged as an important way to conserve nature on private lands. However, their establishment can occur through multiple mechanisms, and in most cases are linked to the objectives of the implementation program and the types of private landholders involved. In Chapter 3, I use the Diffusion of Innovation theory as a guiding conceptual framework and present a hierarchical Bayesian spatial model to understand the spatial patterns of conservation covenant establishment. I estimate how social and ecological context factors and social-geodemographic landholder types relate to the establishment of conservation covenants, and how the relationship between these factors are influenced by different program types.In Chapter 4, I conduct a policy evaluation using a quasi-experimental quantitative policy evaluation approach to identify whether the types of programs and landholders involved in conservation covenants moderate the effectiveness of conservation covenants as a means to protect against forest cover loss. Understanding if the additionality of private land conservation actions varies depending on the type of program and landholder can provide insight for policymakers to strategically design policy.While biodiversity conservation is the primary objective of privately protected areas, delivering ecosystem services is an important co-benefit. In Chapter 5, I investigate the capability of conservation covenant policies to support the management of ecosystem service supply, flow and benefits. This chapter assesses how the primary covenanting program in each Australian state jurisdiction explicitly considers the supply and flows of ecosystem services. I conclude this chapter by offering recommendations as to how to strengthen conservation covenants to support ecosystem services delivery.This thesis contributes to the growing body of knowledge about private land conservation, environmental governance and policy effectiveness, with particular emphasis on how people, places and policies likely influence the role, the conservation outcomes, the associated risks and the opportunities of privately protected areas. In Chapter 6, I provide a high-level synthesis of my research in terms of the main findings and practical implications of this body of work. I also discuss the limitations of each chapter and the overall thesis, and potential future research directions. I end this thesis with remaining concluding remarks.People, places and policies are all important factors contributing to the current extent, the outcomes and the impact of privately protected areas. Yet, ensuring the potential returns of privately protected area expansion in the future will require a deeper understanding of how to best design policies in consideration of these three components to facilitate the increased uptake and effectiveness of privately protected areas. Given the immense pressures on natural areas, the stakes are high and potential returns of upscaling private land conservation to balance the relationship between nature conservation and human development are profound.