Opportunity Costs Of Conservation Research Articles

Systematic nature positive markets.

Environmental markets are a rapidly emerging tool to mobilize private funding to incentivize landholders to undertake more sustainable land management. How units of biodiversity in these markets are measured and subsequently traded creates key challenges ecologically and economically because it determines whether environmental markets can deliver net gains in biodiversity and efficiently lower the costs of conservation. We developed and tested a metric for such markets based on the well-established principle of irreplaceability from systematic conservation planning. Irreplaceability as a metric avoids the limitations of like-for-like trading and allows one to capture the multidimensional nature of ecosystems (e.g., habitats, species, ecosystem functioning) and simultaneously achieve cost-effective, land-manager-led investments in conservation. Using an integrated ecological modeling approach, we tested whether using irreplaceability as a metric is more ecologically and economically beneficial than the simpler biodiversity offset metrics typically used in net gain and no-net-loss policies. Using irreplaceability ensured no net loss, or even net gain, of biodiversity depending on the targets chosen. Other metrics did not provide the same assurances and, depending on the flexibility with which biodiversity targets can be achieved, and how they overlap with development pressure, were less efficient. Irreplaceability reduced the costs of offsetting to developers and the costs of ecological restoration to society. Integrating economic data and systematic conservation planning approaches would therefore assure land managers they were being fairly rewarded for the opportunity costs of conservation and transparently incentivize the most ecologically and economically efficient investments in nature recovery.

The Impact of International Conservation Agreements on Protected Areas: Empirical Findings from the Convention on Biological Diversity Using Causal Inference.

Although 30 years have passed since the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted in 1992, few attempts have been made to evaluate its impact on protected areas. This study investigates the relationship between participation in the CBD and conservation effort in member countries, using an original dataset of 169 countries from 1992 to 2015. Our measure of conservation effort is the percentage of a country's terrestrial area under protection, which is the primary mechanism for achieving the CBD's conservation as distinct from its sustainable use or access and benefit-sharing objectives. We consider how protected area expansion relates to membership of the CBD, and a set of socio-economic and political variables that measure both the opportunity cost of conservation and national responsiveness to the demand for public goods. We find a positive and significant relationship between the area under protection, membership of the CBD, and a dummy for the Aichi biodiversity targets-Nagoya protocol. We also find that the area under protection is negatively related to measures of economic development and education (proxies for the opportunity cost of conservation), and positively associated with forest area (a proxy for species richness and endemism). We conclude that, at least for this measure of conservation effort, the CBD has had a significant impact, albeit moderated in predictable ways by the opportunity cost of conservation.

Global justice and the opportunity costs of conservation.

Opportunity costs can represent a significant portion of the costs associated with conservation projects and frequently outstrip other kinds of cost. They are typically understood to refer to the benefits someone would have obtained if conservation projects had not required them to give up current activities, such as farming or hunting or if the land had been available for uses other than conservation. This familiar way of identifying opportunity costs is flawed, however, because it threatens to condone, or take advantage of, the injustices that many people face that affect their opportunities. I integrated ideas from the political theory of global justice to examine how the analysis of opportunity costs illustrates the importance of considering conservation and issues of global justice together, rather than thinking about them in isolation. I distinguish four baselines for defining opportunity costs. A status quo baseline defines opportunity costs by asking what people would have earned had a conservation project not happened. A willingness to accept baseline defines them by asking people what it would take to make them indifferent to whether a conservation project takes place or not. An antipoverty baseline suggests that opportunity costs have been met when people affected by a project are not left in poverty. An egalitarian baseline suggests opportunity costs have been met when people are not left in relative disadvantage, with worse than average opportunities. I argue that the egalitarian baseline is the most acceptable from the point of view of justice. Such a baseline would suggest that, in practice, many of the world's poor are being unjustly treated, or even exploited, as a result of conservation activities.

Investigating acceptance of marine tourism levies, to cover the opportunity costs of conservation for coastal communities

Marine tourism is promoted as a substitute economic activity to unsustainable fishing, which is compatible with conservation. However, benefits of marine tourism do not typically accrue in small-scale fisheries (SSFs), which often bear the costs of conservation; they accrue to tourists and tourist-focussed businesses. We explored how marine tourism levies could operationalise the beneficiary-pays principle and address these cost-benefit inequities using an online contingent valuation (CV) survey to measure international tourists' willingness-to-pay (WTP) towards community-based shark conservation (N = 1033). Levies were widely supported (96%), with median and Turnbull mean WTP of US$ 10–14.99 and $22.02 per person per day, respectively. We combined these results with data from two marine tourism hotspots in Indonesia – Lombok and Pulau Weh – to explore the feasibility of implementing tourism levies to incentivize pro-conservation behaviour in local SSFs. Our conservative estimates indicate that marine tourism levies in Lombok and Pulau Weh could respectively generate US$ 2.3–10 million and US$ 300,000–1.3 million annually – several times greater than the estimated costs of conservation incentives in local SSFs. The marine tourism industry offers an under-utilised revenue stream for marine conservation, which could support policy aspirations such as ‘a sustainable and equitable blue economy’.

An investment strategy to address biodiversity loss from agricultural expansion

The landmark 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment cited land-use change as the primary driver of biodiversity loss. The 2016 peace agreement in Colombia has led to increasing agricultural expansion into biodiversity-rich forests. We have focused on the case of Colombia to demonstrate an approach to maximize the biodiversity benefits from limited conservation funding while ensuring that landowners maintain economic returns equivalent to agriculture. We applied a quantitative model that relates conservation investment to national biodiversity outcomes. Then we identified six regions with high potential return on investment by spatially modelling the risk of forest conversion and the expected impact of conservation actions. Our results suggest that agricultural expansion, left unchecked, would increase national biodiversity loss by 38–52% by 2033, and that doubling investment is necessary to counteract this loss. Our approach can be broadly used to target investment to weigh development and biodiversity goals. We demonstrate the approach in Colombia with its accelerated social and environmental changes and show how the efficiency of conservation options can be improved by considering opportunity cost of conservation to communities whose livelihoods depend on agriculture. This approach can be applied to other contexts to examine development and policy priorities to estimate financial needs for achieving biodiversity goals.

Benefits and costs of incentive-based forest conservation in the Peruvian Amazon

A growing literature focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of forest conservation policies, but few studies explore where and under which conditions programs produce net positive benefits. Quantifying the costs and benefits of conservation policy instruments contributes to making impact evaluation more relevant for policy makers and can help to improve program design. Here we analyze the costs and benefits of deforestation avoided by the Peruvian Programa Bosques between 2011 and 2015. Our approach builds on an ex post counterfactual-based impact evaluation and considers spatial heterogeneity in conservation opportunity costs as well as uncertainty across a wide range of parameters. We rely on existing social cost of carbon estimates to value benefits and calculate implementation and administration costs from primary and secondary sources. Our estimates suggest that deforestation was avoided at a negative net future value of US$ 13.7 Million in 2015. Poor conservation performance is mainly due to high implementation and administration costs (~67% of total budget). Nevertheless, participating communities benefited from an estimated net transfer of US$ 7.7 Million. Our result emphasizes the need to boost impact, secure the permanence of the avoided deforestation, and minimize program implementation costs, while paying carefully attention to distributional outcomes.

What Drives the Erasure of Protected Areas? Evidence from across the Brazilian Amazon

Protected areas (PAs) are a widely used strategy for conserving forests and ecosystem services. When PAs succeed in deterring economic activities that degrade forests, the impacts include more forest yet less economic gain. These economic opportunity costs of conservation lead actors with economic interests to resist new PAs, driving their sites away from profitable market centers and towards areas featuring lower opportunity costs. Further, after PAs are created, economic actors may want PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (collectively PADDD). We examine reductions in PAs' spatial extent – downsizings (partial erasures) and degazettements (complete erasures) − that presumably reduce protection. Using data for the entire Brazilian Amazon from PADDDtracker.org, our empirical analyses explore whether size reductions from 2006 to 2015 resulted from bargaining between development and conservation. We find that the risks of PA size reductions are raised by: lower travel costs (as implied by distances to roads and cities), which affect economic gains and enforcement; greater PA size, which affects enforcement; and more prior internal deforestation, which lowers the impacts of size reductions. These dynamics of protection offer insights on the potentially conflicting factors that lead to PA size reductions, with implications for policymaking to enhance PA effectiveness and permanence.

Science-to-conservation disconnections in Borneo and British Columbia

Borneo differs fundamentally from Canada, but reflections on the struggles to improve the fates of its tropical rain forests may resonate with people engaged in the same struggles on the other side of the Pacific. I frame these reflections around the question of why my efforts as a researcher in Borneo failed to cause a change from predatory logging of old growth to conservation through improved forest management. Perhaps my most fundamental mistake was unwillingness to recognize the immense profitability of forest liquidation through multiple-premature re-entry logging, especially when followed by conversion to plantations of African oil palm or Australian acacias. Superimposed on the high opportunity costs of conservation were governance failures that diminished the effectiveness of policies set by government as well as those set by certifiers of responsible management. Conservation of the mostly remote, flooded, and steep hinterlands still covered by forest will benefit from acknowledgment of the internationally recognized intrinsic land rights of Borneo’s indigenous peoples combined with full economic cost accounting of the consequences of forest degradation and conversion. Given the global importance of old growth in Borneo, Canada, and elsewhere, global funding for conservation should be made available with safeguards such as UNESCO Biosphere designations.

Household economy, forest dependency & opportunity costs of conservation in eastern rainforests of Madagascar

The Government of Madagascar is trying to reduce deforestation and conserve biodiversity through creating new protected areas in the eastern rainforests. While this has many benefits, forest use restriction may bring costs to farmers at the forest frontier. We explored this through a series of surveys in five sites around the Corridor Ankeniheny Zahamena new protected area and adjacent national parks. In phase one a stratified random sample of 603 households completed a household survey covering demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and a choice experiment to estimate the opportunity costs of conservation. A stratified sub-sample (n = 171) then completed a detailed agricultural survey (including recording inputs and outputs from 721 plots) and wild-harvested product survey. The data have been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service). Together these allow a deeper understanding of the household economy on the forest frontier in eastern Madagascar and their swidden agricultural system, the benefits households derive from the forests through wild-harvested products, and the costs of conservation restrictions to forest edge communities.

Opportunity Cost of Environmental Conservation in the Presence of Externalities: Application to the Farmed and Wild Salmon Trade-Off in Norway

Estimation of the opportunity cost is necessary for the economic assessment of environmental conservation policies. This paper considers the case where an environmental good is negatively affected in the process of the production of marketable goods. In the presence of externalities, conservation implies the undertaking of abatement measures by polluters. A relevant measure of opportunity cost in these settings is the abatement cost required to preserve or restore a unit of the environmental good in question. Current economic literature lacks an established methodology for deriving such measures, as it commonly focuses on pricing pollutants rather than the natural stocks affected by them. This paper uses a non-optimal valuation approach suggested by Fenichel and Abbott (JAERE 1(1/2):1–27, 2014) as a point of departure and develops a framework for deriving the opportunity cost of conservation as the cost of externality abatement per unit of environmental good. An empirical illustration is provided for the case of the farmed and wild salmon trade-off in Norway in light of the current pollution control regulations.

Economic analysis of threatened species conservation: The case of woodland caribou and oilsands development in Alberta, Canada

Tradeoffs between cost and recovery targets for boreal caribou herds, threatened species in Alberta, Canada, are examined using a dynamic cost minimization model. Unlike most approaches used for minimizing costs of achieving threatened species targets, we incorporate opportunity costs of surface (forests) and subsurface resources (energy) as well as direct costs of conservation (habitat restoration and direct predator control), into a forward looking model of species protection. Opportunity costs of conservation over time are minimized with an explicit target date for meeting species recovery targets; defined as the number of self-sustaining caribou herds, which requires that both habitat and population targets are met by a set date. The model was run under various scenarios including three species recovery criteria, two oil and gas price regimes, and targets for the number of herds to recover from 1 to 12. The derived cost curve follows a typical pattern as costs of recovery per herd increase as the number of herds targeted for recovery increases. The results also show that the opportunity costs for direct predator control are small compared to habitat restoration and protection costs. However, direct predator control is essential for meeting caribou population targets and reducing the risk of extirpation while habitat is recovered over time.

Converting Forests to Farms: The Economic Benefits of Clearing Forests in Agricultural Settlements in the Amazon

Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is believed to bring local economic benefits at the expense of global environmental costs. The resulting tension is reflected in Brazilian government policy. The national agrarian reform program has settled farm families in the Amazon region since the 1970s, with the expectation that they will clear forests in order to farm the land. On the other hand, recent Brazilian policy initiatives seek to reduce deforestation to mitigate climate change. We contribute to the policy debate that surrounds these dual goals for the Amazon by estimating the marginal effects of new agricultural land on the full income and assets of farm settlers over a 13-year period from 1996 to 2009. Using micro panel data from agrarian settlements where forest was being rapidly cleared, and controlling for factors that would otherwise confound the relationship, we estimate the effect of converting forest to agriculture on total household income to estimate the opportunity cost of conserving forest. Our measure of income reflects any re-allocation of resources by utility maximizing households and any productivity effects due to loss of forest ecosystem services. The estimated effect of new agricultural land on income is positive, but small relative to the income per hectare of previously cleared land. However, we show that income increases investment in physical assets, which raises households’ income generating capacity and future accumulation of assets. Thus, while there is only a small immediate income gain from clearing more forest, the long-term effects on wealth are still substantial. This demonstrates that given the right conditions, conversion of forest to agricultural land can be an impetus for asset accumulation by smallholders. It also highlights the importance of considering the indirect and long-term welfare benefits of new agricultural land when assessing the opportunity costs of forest conservation.

An assessment of the efficiency and ecological representativity of existing marine reserve networks in Wales, UK

Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are one of the several means of protecting ocean biodiversity and are fundamental to the Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 of 2010. However, many existing reserves are inefficient in meeting current conservation goals and are questioned regarding their habitat representivity. This paper assesses the efficiency of existing Welsh reserves in meeting conservation goals, including implications of changing objectives. Marxan conservation planning software was used to determine 20 broad-scale habitat types found in territorial seas, using data obtained from the European Environment Agency's Level 3 Predicted EUNIS Habitats GIS dataset. Results demonstrated that the current Welsh MPA network, even at the lowest conservation targets (≤10%), fails to suitably represent more than two-thirds of the broad-scale habitats found in its coastal waters. Subsequently, a range of alternative reserve design scenarios was developed to reduce inefficiency opportunity costs. Analysis indicated that an increase of less than 5% in total reserve area, plus a retention of 75% of the current network area, would create a new network to meet or exceed all stated conservation goals. Therefore, existing reserves can be incorporated into an efficient, ecologically representative network that reduces international conservation opportunity costs.

Heterogeneous Impact of a Collective Payment for Environmental Services Scheme on Reducing Deforestation in Cambodia

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are increasingly used in tropical countries as incentives to improve forest conservation outcomes, notably in forests managed or owned by rural communities. However, little is known about the performance and the suitable conditions under which collective PES can be effective. We assess the impact of a collective PES on reducing deforestation in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia. We use a quasi-experimental approach combining covariate matching with difference-in-difference estimation as a procedure to assess program effectiveness on reducing deforestation. We find that the PES program contributed additionally saving on average about 0.17 percentage point of the enrolled PES area per year during 2005–12. We also highlight that characteristics such as slope, proximity to roads, and number of households are associated with heterogeneous PES impact. We finally call for improving both data availability and impact assessment methods in order to test better theories of change that take into account not only the ability of payments to reduce opportunity costs of conservation but also to consider how PES are turned into improved community collective action likely to improve the local enforcement of conservation.

Will up-scaled forest conservation incentives in the Peruvian Amazon produce cost-effective and equitable outcomes?

SUMMARYDeforestation and forest degradation in the Peruvian Amazon represent a major threat to biodiversity-related ecosystem services and the global climate. In 2010, the Peruvian Ministry of Environment launched the National Forest Conservation Program for Climate Change Mitigation, an innovative approach to maintaining forest cover of over 54 million hectares of land in protected areas and indigenous and peasant communities. A key component is a payments for environmental services scheme encouraging investments in sustainable land and forest uses in community-controlled territories. We conducted an ex-ante assessment of how the program would play out in terms of conservation cost–effectiveness, income effects and distributional (equity) outcomes if payments were up-scaled, as intended, to all native communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Our spatially explicit impact assessment relied on remotely sensed deforestation data and field data-supported estimates of conservation opportunity costs. We found that the spatially heterogeneous distribution of forestland and economic returns to multiple land uses across communities results in important tradeoffs between hypothetical cost–effectiveness, poverty alleviation and equity outcomes. Nevertheless, our scenario analyses suggested that alternative design options for payment schemes could improve both cost–effectiveness and equity outcomes simultaneously.

Assessing the potential for niche market development to contribute to farmers' livelihoods and agrobiodiversity conservation: Insights from the finger millet case study in Nepal

This paper explores the potential for niche market development of neglected and underutilized species as an intervention for improving both smallholder livelihoods and the agrobiodiversity conservation. We consider the case of finger millet, which plays an important role in the food security of Nepalese poor and marginalized farmers. Despite such importance, production and consumption are decreasing as a result of, inter alia, the expanding availability of more profitable crops, a lack of awareness regarding its nutritional qualities by urban consumers and limited R&D dedicated to this crop. Nevertheless, the potential to improve the ability of farmers to capture the values related to the positive environmental and nutritional externalities associated with the production and consumption of local landraces, suggests that the conservation through use of such genetic resources can support the achievement of development goals. We analyse both the demand and supply side of a potential niche market for local finger millets. Using a choice experiment we find that urban consumers have a willingness to pay a premium price sufficient to compensate producers' conservation opportunity costs. We also identify a range of challenges for such an intervention to be considered effective from both an economic and ecological perspective.

Coastal Communities WTA Compensation for conservation of mangrove forests: a choice experiment approach

Protection of mangrove forests entails the decrease and restriction of their injudicious uses by local people and therefore imposes opportunity costs on poor local communities, which often depend on these forest resources for their subsistence. This study aims to quantify the economic opportunity cost of conservation for coastal communities living in areas adjacent to mangrove forests in the southern coasts of Iran. The main commercial uses of the mangrove forests in this area are restricted to fishing, tourist boating trips, and limited leaves cutting. We applied a choice experiment method to measure the costs of the forest exploitation reduction under hypothetical protection scenarios in which local users would receive monetary compensation to lessen or forgo mangrove forest utilization. The results showed that local communities are willing to accept lower compensation when the protection is meant to decrease the frequency of Hara cutting and fishing, as opposed to banning recreational opportunities. The mean WTA was estimated to be 55 662 500 IRR.hsld-1 .yr-1 (2026 USD), which was generally lower than opportunity costs in the form of foregone income. Before implementing any policies related to equity, our findings can provide policymakers with useful prior knowledge and prescription.

Factors influencing incidental representation of previously unknown conservation features in marine protected areas.

Spatially explicit information on species distributions for conservation planning is invariably incomplete; therefore, the use of surrogates is required to represent broad-scale patterns of biodiversity. Despite significant interest in the effectiveness of surrogates for predicting spatial distributions of biodiversity, few researchers have explored questions involving the ability of surrogates to incidentally represent unknown features of conservation interest. We used the Great Barrier Reef marine reserve network to examine factors affecting incidental representation of conservation features that were unknown at the time the reserve network was established. We used spatially explicit information on the distribution of 39 seabed habitats and biological assemblages and the conservation planning software Marxan to examine how incidental representation was affected by the spatial characteristics of the features; the conservation objectives (the minimum proportion of each feature included in no-take areas); the spatial configuration of no-take areas; and the opportunity cost of conservation. Cost was closely and inversely correlated to incidental representation. However, incidental representation was achieved, even in a region with only coarse-scale environmental data, by adopting a precautionary approach that explicitly considered the potential for unknown features. Our results indicate that incidental representation is enhanced by partitioning selection units along biophysical gradients to account for unknown within-feature variability and ensuring that no-take areas are well distributed throughout the region; by setting high conservation objectives that (in this case >33%) maximize the chances of capturing unknown features incidentally; and by carefully considering the designation of cost to planning units when using decision-support tools for reserve design. The lessons learned from incidental representation in the Great Barrier Reef have implications for conservation planning in other regions, particularly those that lack detailed environmental and ecological data.

Agricultural system transitions in selected Indian states: What do the related indicators say about the underlying biodiversity changes and economic trade-offs?

The article describes the land use system transition dynamics in selected states in India and discusses its underlying biodiversity impacts and economic driving forces. The concept of system transition is described as a continuum between forests and highly intensive agriculture via different grades of intensification where profit differential is identified as the system transition pressure. In order to operationalise the concept, the article develops land use suitability, input use intensity and farming system diversity indices which are calculated for different agricultural cropping systems in the selected states of India. The results show the apparent decline in land use suitability, reduction in farming system diversity, increase of cultivation intensity, reflecting a reduction in planned and associated agro-biodiversity. The results also show increasing transition pressure to shift from low intensive and high diverse systems to high intensive low diverse systems that represent increasing opportunity cost of conservation of the former systems. A set of policy measures to deflate the transition pressure that can at least retain a threshold of traditional high diversity systems are briefly discussed. The study also outlines further research directions.

The Opportunity Costs of Conservation with Deterministic and Probabilistic Degradation Externalities

This experimental study examines variations in the opportunity cost of conservation in two linear appropriation games that include symmetric and asymmetric subject payoffs. In the first game, appropriation leads to deterministic degradation in the value of a shared resource. In the second game, appropriation leads to both deterministic and probabilistic degradation, introducing endogenous uncertainty in the value of the opportunity cost of conserving the shared resource. The results show that subjects systematically decrease appropriation the lower the opportunity cost of conservation, and the addition of probabilistic degradation leads to further decreases in group appropriation. As conjectured, the response of individual subjects to the addition of probabilistic degradation is conditional on their expected marginal net benefits to appropriate, which depend in turn on their first order beliefs of others’ appropriation. The overall decreases in appropriation due to probabilistic degradation, however, are not large enough to offset decreases in expected efficiency due to expected losses in the value of the shared resource.