Current efforts for habitat protection, based largely on government efforts to establish protected areas, are not keeping pace with biodiversity loss. The conservation community must explore means for in situ protection that supplement existing government efforts. One possibility is the privately owned nature reserve. In this descriptive study a written survey of privately owned nature reserves in Sub‐Saharan Africa and Latin America was undertaken to identify their economic attributes, initial objectives, and factors necessary for attaining those objectives. Data from 32 managers of private reserves revealed that reserves can be a profitable venture. Over half were realizing a profit, and profitability among reserves had risen 21% since 1989. Despite this economic success, they proved to be motivated more by conservation goals than by personal or economic objectives. Overall the respondents ranked management factors more important than geographic, social/political, financial, or stochastic factors for accomplishing reserves’ objectives. The presence of “interesting ecological attractions” was rated the single most important factor and those factors relating to government involvement were considered least important. The results show private reserves to be an important albeit little‐known example of private‐sector involvement in conservation. The results also provide a useful analysis for those interested in private reserves, those currently operating them, and those wishing to establish them.
Floodplain and riparian ecosystems are noteworthy for their biodiversity conservation value as well as for their widespread conversion to agriculture. Recent evidence indicates that the conversion of remaining habitat may be accelerating because of a new threat: on‐farm practices meant to promote food safety. Nationwide, US fruit and vegetable farmers report being pressured by commercial produce buyers to engage in land‐use practices that are not conducive to wildlife and habitat conservation, in a scientifically questionable attempt to reduce food‐borne illness risk. We measured the extent of impacts from some of these practices in a leading produce‐growing region of California. Over a 5‐year period following an outbreak of toxic Escherichia coli from spinach, a crop grown extensively in the region, 13.3% of remaining riparian habitat was eliminated or degraded. If these practices were implemented statewide, across all crops, up to 40% of riparian habitat and 45% of wetlands in some counties would be affected. This study highlights the importance of managing farms for both food safety and ecological health through the use of an evidence‐based, adaptive management approach. Ongoing biodiversity loss and global integration of the food supply make these findings relevant wherever produce is grown.
Efforts to protect vulnerable environmental resources have focused largely on legal prohibitions and sanctions or on economic rewards or penalties. The role and importance of social and cultural factors have been much less considered. While theoretical arguments have addressed whether state institutions must be involved in resource protection, or whether private incentives can be manipulated to achieve desired outcomes, this preoccupation with either public sector or private sector solutions to the problems of environmental conservation has caused a neglect of social values and community consensus. The analysis offered here seeks to enlarge the debate from being two-sided to three-cornered.By bringing in a third set of considerations, the socio-cultural, the analysis underscores that individual decisions are embedded in community and local contexts. All three kinds of incentives are considered to be potentially of equal importance for resource-conserving behaviour (RCB) vis-à-vis resource-degrading behaviour (RDB). The analysis is concerned first with the strength of different incentives in favour of RCB compared to RDB, comparing legal and economic with socio-cultural considerations affecting RCB and RDB. Efforts to protect vulnerable resources can seek to alter in an RCB direction the attitudes and incentives of people along any or all of these three dimensions of motivation, or they can seek to make a particular domain of motivation more salient if it is supportive of environmental conservation.This analysis is proposed in part to get the socio-cultural domain taken more seriously alongside the legal and economic domains, as well as to prompt more systematic consideration of different kinds of policies, investments, actions or pronouncements that could shift the net balance of incentives in favour of RCB. While the analysis is admittedly simplified, there is utility in encouraging focused comparisons and evaluations of conservation alternatives. Examples of efforts to promote RCB in Madagascar and Costa Rica are given to illustrate this.
The alarming pace of tropical biodiversity loss requires development of innovative approaches for in situ biodiversity conservation. Incentive-based approaches have emerged as one possible option. We interviewed 68 private nature reserve owners to learn more about one of Costa Rica's incentive programs. The interview group included all reserve owners participating in the government's Private Wildlife Refuge Program (n ϭ 22) and a control group of nonparticipating owners (n ϭ 46). Quantitative and qualitative data led to seven main conclusions on the use of incentive programs: (1) a developing country can expand and enhance its formal park system through conservation incentives; (2) insufficient promotion, and resulting information gaps, can prevent an incentive program from realizing its full potential; (3) landowners enter a program not only in response to the intended incentive package, but also for several powerful and hidden incentives such as publicity and marketing purposes; (4) underutilization of official incentives by participants, in part due to sporadic delivery of incentives by the government, can undermine program effectiveness; (5) biodiversity protection goals can be accomplished by means of a wide range of incentives; (6) programs that require only a short-term commitment by landowners can still lead to long-term biodiversity protection; and (7) a program can produce unanticipated negative consequences at the national level, including putting conservation at odds with social justice. These and other lessons on the use of incentives should be of interest wherever biodiversity is threatened, wherever new conservation partners are being sought, and wherever incentive-based approaches are being considered.
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