Economics and Land‐Use Change in Prioritizing Private Land Conservation

Abstract

Incentive-based strategies such as conservation easements and short-term management agreements are popular tools for conserving biodiversity on private lands. Billions of dollars are spent by government and private conservation organizations to support land conservation. Although much of conservation biology focuses on reserve design, these methods are often ineffective at optimizing the protection of biological benefits for conservation programs. Our review of the recent literature on protected-area planning identifies some of the reasons why. We analyzed the site-selection process according to three important components: biological benefits, land costs, and likelihood of land-use change. We compared our benefit-loss-cost targeting approach with more conventional strategies that omit or inadequately address either land costs or likelihood of land-use change. Our proposed strategy aims to minimize the expected loss in biological benefit due to future land-use conversion while considering the full or partial costs of land acquisition. The implicit positive correlation between the likelihood of land-use conversion and cost of land protection means high-vulnerability sites with suitable land quality are typically more expensive than low-vulnerability sites with poor land quality. Therefore, land-use change and land costs need to be addressed jointly to improve spatial targeting strategies for land conservation. This approach can be extended effectively to land trusts and other institutions implementing conservation programs.Economía y Cambio en el Uso de Suelo en la Priorización de la Conservación de Tierras Privadas Resumen: Las estrategias basadas en incentivos, como los derechos de conservación y los acuerdos de manejo a corto plazo, son herramientas populares para conservar la biodiversidad en tierras privadas. Las organizaciones conservacionistas gubernamentales y privadas gastan billones de dólares para financiar la conservación. Aunque la mayor parte de la biología de la conservación se centra en el diseño de reservas, estos métodos a menudo no son efectivos para laóptima protección de los beneficios biológicos de los programas de conservación. Nuestra revisión de la literatura reciente sobre planificación deáreas protegidas identifica algunas de las razones de lo anterior. Analizamos los procesos de selección de sitios en función de tres componentes importantes: beneficios biológicos, costo de las tierras y la probabilidad de cambio en el uso de suelo. Comparamos nuestro enfoque en el beneficio-pérdida-costo con métodos más tradicionales que omiten, o abordan inadecuadamente, el costo de las tierras y/o la probabilidad de cambio en el uso de suelo. La estrategia que proponemos trata de minimizar la pérdida esperada del beneficio biológico debido a la conversión del uso de suelo en el futuro al tiempo que considera los costos parciales o totales de la adquisición de tierras. La correlación positiva implícita entre la probabilidad de conversión en el uso de suelo y el costo de la protección de tierras signific...

Integrating Land Market Feedbacks into Conservation Planning—A Mathematical Programming Approach

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Quantifying climate change mitigation potential in the United States Great Plains wetlands for three greenhouse gas emission scenarios

“…In the Great Plains, numerous organizations are partnering to establish an SOC bank through acquisition of conservation easements (Ducks Unlimited Inc. et al 2009). Consideration of threat of conversion, as well as cost and biological benefits (such as carbon) has been shown to be a successful strategy for maximizing the avoided loss of these benefits (Newburn et al 2005(Newburn et al , 2006Merenlender et al 2009). Our analysis presents a coarse-scale assessment of regional wetland avoided loss potential across a large area.…”

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