Large Scale Marine Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation Along a Linear Gradient: Cooperation, Strategic Behavior or Conservation Autarky?

Abstract

In this paper we investigate effects of overlap in species between ecosystems along a linear gradient on the location of marine protected areas (MPAs) under full cooperation, strategic behavior and conservation autarky. Compared to the full cooperation outcome, both strategic behavior and conservation autarky lead to under-investment in biodiversity protection. Under strategic behavior, however, we observe the additional problem of "location leakage" i.e. countries invest less in species protected by others. Conservation autarky eliminates location leakage; in ecosystems with partly overlapping species compositions at country borders it even induces MPAs that are too large from a global perspective. We also find that, in our setting of a linear gradient without migrating species, countries focus their conservation efforts on species unique to their own country and that these species are relatively well protected compared to common species.

Court Ruling Creates Opportunity to Improve Management of Nonnative Fish and Wildlife in the United States

“…Potential pitfalls include excessive top‐down direction, decreased buy‐in of entities that differ in valuation of conservation priorities, and “location leakage” whereby entities invest less in a conservation problem because the issue is being addressed by others (Punt et al. ; Kark et al. ).…”

International cooperation on biodiversity conservation when spatial structures matter

“…Circular structure of the game Spatial configurations have recently been built into models of New Economic Geography (e.g., Fujita, Krugman, & Venables, 1999;Mossay, 2013) and environmental economics (e.g., Albers, Ando, & Batz, 2008;Ando & Shah, 2010;Goeschl & Igliori, 2004;Punt et al, 2012). Hotelling's (1929) location model is one of the main models of industry location.…”

“…A broad game-theoretic literature that studies IEAs as games of coalition formation has emerged since the seminal analysis of Hoel (1992), Carraro and Siniscalco (1993), and Barrett (1994a) (see the surveys by Finus, 2008;and Benchekroun & Long, 2012). However, only a few studies explicitly address IEAs for conservation, such as Barrett (1994b), Punt, Weikard, Ierland, and Stel (2012), Ansink and Bouma (2013), Winands, Holm-Müller, and Weikard (2013), and Alvarado-Quesada and Weikard (2015). Yet, the impact of the spatial dimension of agreements on their stability and effectiveness has not been studied thoroughly.…”

International Environmental Agreements for biodiversity conservation: a game-theoretic analysis

“…Since it is plausible that two countries preserve some common species, we assume that global biodiversity conservation is a subadditive function of the aggregate of all countries' individual biodiversity conservation. An explicit aggregation model of biodiversity across regions has been developed by Punt et al (2012). The model of this paper focuses on the conservation of biological diversity as an intrinsic policy goal.…”