Abstract
Private land often encompasses biodiversity features of high conservation value, but its protection is not straightforward. Commonly, landowners’ perspectives are rightfully allowed to influence conservation actions. This unlikely comes without consequences on biodiversity or other aspects such as economic considerations, but these consequences are rarely quantitatively considered in decision-making. In the context of boreal mire protection in Finland, we report how acknowledging landowners’ resistance to protection changes the combination of mires selected to conservation compared to ignoring landowners’ opinions. Using spatial prioritization, we quantify trade-offs arising between the amount of landowners’ resistance, protected biodiversity, and financial costs in different conservation scenarios. Results show that the trade-offs cannot be fully avoided. Nevertheless, we show that the systematic examination of the trade-offs opens up options to alleviate them. This can promote the evaluation of different conservation policy outcomes, enabling better-informed conservation decisions and more effective and socially sustainable allocation of conservation resources.
Highlights
In the face of global environmental threats such as climate change (IPCC 2018) and biodiversity decline
Of the total 929 000 ha included in the prioritizations, the existing protected mire network covered 64.8% (601 700 ha) and the candidate mires 35.2% (327 300 ha) (Fig. 2). 53.7% of average representation of biodiversity features included in the prioritizations were situated on the existing protected mire network (Fig. 2; Table 1)
This is problematic as conservation resources are often scarce with respect to conservation aims and requirements (Geldmann et al 2018), meaning that less money would be available for other conservation purposes and still, the biodiversity effect of the scenario is inferior compared to the other scenarios
Summary
Study caseThis study considers mire ecosystems as a case. ‘Mire’ is a general term for natural and semi-natural peatlands actively forming peat (Lindsay 2018). There was a political agreement to implement CMPP according to the Nature Conservation Act, which allows land expropriations for conservation purposes without landowners’ consent (Salomaa et al 2018). Regardless of whether private land is protected voluntarily or via expropriations, the Act requires all protected sites to be economically fully compensated to landowners from public funds (Alanen and Aapala 2015). The rejection was praised for acknowledging private property rights, and criticized because voluntarily protecting mires as hydrological entities was seen potentially challenging as landownership in Finland is very fragmented and majority of the candidate mires are owned by more than one person
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