Importance of equitable cost sharing in the Convention on Biological Diversity's protected area agenda

Stark, Keila; Adams, Vanessa M.; Brown, Christopher J.; Chauvenet, Aliénor L. M.; Davis, Katrina; Game, Edward T.; Halpern, Benjamin S.; Lynham, John; Mappin, Bonnie; Selkoe, Kim; Watson, James; Possingham, Hugh P.; Klein, Carissa J.

doi:10.1111/cobi.13812

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Diverting just a small share of these immense resources might allow policy makers to give affected people the support they are entitled to. Even those funds that are already earmarked for conservation are poorly targeted, with the vast majority of funding spent in the global north, despite the fact that the global south contains most biodiversity (Stark et al., 2021: 2). This should be urgently remedied.…”

Section: Egalitarian Baseline and The Biodiversity Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

Global justice and the opportunity costs of conservation

Armstrong

2022

Conservation Biology

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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.

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Section: Egalitarian Baseline and The Biodiversity Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

Global justice and the opportunity costs of conservation

Armstrong

2022

Conservation Biology

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“…However, a large increase in ambition also magnifies the cost and with it, the level of political tension around any perceived distributional inequity. If the cost-sharing issue is not satisfactorily resolved 7 , there is a danger that the language of the final agreement will become diluted and vague, or that the political commitments made will lack the funding needed to adequately implement them. Underfunded “paper commitments” are unlikely to resolve the global environmental problems they claim to address, just as “paper parks 8 ” fail to protect nature on the ground.…”

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confidence: 99%

The costs of global protected-area expansion (Target 3 of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework) may fall more heavily on lower-income countries

Waldron

Besançon²,

Watson

et al. 2022

Preprint

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One of the biggest stumbling blocks for global environmental agreements is how higher-income and lower-income countries share the costs of implementing them. This problem has become particularly acute as biodiversity and climate ambitions have increased across recent COPs (Conferences of Parties). Here, we estimate the likely distribution of costs for one of the most ambitious proposals: draft Target 3 of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which would increase coverage of protected and conserved areas (PCAs) to 30% of global land and sea area - more than triple the current value. Since the GBF does not specify where new PCAs would be placed, we use three scenarios of how Target 3 might be implemented, cost those scenarios, and then compare the mean distribution of costs across World Bank income groups. We find that in relative terms, lower-income countries could face considerably larger financial burdens than high-income countries, even though the benefits of conservation are disproportionately enjoyed by high-income countries. Lower-income countries would also face larger increases in the amount of land or sea under conservation, implying higher opportunity and establishment costs. Resolving this potential cost-sharing inequity may be a key requirement to achieve consensus on draft Target 3, and indeed on ambitious environmental proposals more generally.

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