Targeting Tools for the Purchase of Environmental Amenities

Spatial targeting of agri-environmental policy and urban development

“…The relative weight of both mechanisms depends on which farmers adopt the policy within the target area W . More generally, authors have highlighted that basing an AEP solely on cost or benefits criteria is less efficient than a policy based on the benefit to cost ratio (Babcock et al, 1997;Uthes et al, 2010). Following the results of our model, we therefore propose the idea of double spatial targeting, which should consider both benefits -a decrease in the level of agricultural pollution and an improvement in the level of amenity -and costs -additional urban development and residential pollutionresulting from the implementation of an AEP.…”

Maximizing conservation and in-kind cost share: Applying Goal Programming to forest protection

“…While researchers have long advocated for the inclusion of costs as part of the selection process through either benefit-cost targeting (Babcock et al 1997) or integer programming (Underhill 1994), the literature has not addressed issues around how to best incorporate in-kind cost sharing from partners into the selection process. While in-kind cost share contributions are implicitly accounted for through the lower project costs facing the funding organization, this fails to take full advantage of the additional information potentially provided by the size of the in-kind cost share, such as the level of commitment of the partner organization and the political benefits of being able to use program funds to leverage resources from other organizations, agencies, and individuals.…”

“…These parcel-specific scores are then used by the selection mechanism, typically a Benefit Targeting (BT) algorithm, which is essentially a greedy algorithm where projects are funded from highest to lowest benefit score until funds are exhausted. This approach has been subject to substantial criticism as being very inefficient, and it has been repeatedly proposed that adopting alternative mathematical optimization methods would lead to superior outcomes (for example, Babcock, et al, 1997;Polasky, et al, 2001;Wu, et al, 2000).…”

Biodiversity Conservation in Swedish Forests: Ways Forward for a 30-Year-Old Multi-Scaled Approach

“…In theory, whichever of biological values or land costs of potential areas have the largest variability will have the largest influence on the overall cost-effectiveness (Babcock et al 1997;Ferraro 2003). The evidence available suggests that the variability in costs of areas is often at least as high as that of biological values (Naidoo et al 2006), and therefore, costs should generally be acknowledged systematically to reach a high cost-effectiveness.…”