Using Sciences to Improve the Economic Efficiency of Conservation Policies

Abstract

In the last 20 years, both public and private expenditures on resource conservation and environmental protection have increased dramatically. However, there are numerous technical and political barriers to the efficient use of conservation funds. This paper discusses some of these barriers and approaches to overcoming them. It argues that ecosystem complexities such as threshold effects, ecosystem linkages, and spatial connections often mitigate against politically palatable criteria for resource allocation. Ignoring these complexities is likely to result in substantial efficiency losses. While challenges are daunting for the efficient management of conservation investments, payoff is potentially high for the use of sciences.

Do Conservation Practices and Programs Benefit the Intended Resource Concern?

“…Although the nonlinear nature of the impact of such biophysical processes has not been adequately addressed by previous empirical, economic analyses of conservation programs (Wu, 2003;Wu et al, 2004), the present study contributes to the literature by demonstrating how a set of these relationships could be modeled in an agricultural watershed. The ability to model acute and cumulative fisheries impacts from changes in agricultural practices has importance as a potential tool for: (a) measuring the effectiveness of performance-based conservation practices under programs like CSP; (b) establishing an effective total maximum daily load (TMDL) for agricultural watersheds ; (c) modeling the effectiveness of conservation practices at addressing TMDLs; and (d) estimating the associated economic costs to agriculture in addressing TMDLs.…”

“…The methodological approach we use contributes to the existing literature by capturing ecological threshold effects and creating linkages between managed systems and ecosystems. These linkages are essential in analyzing or designing conservation policies that address critical resource concerns (Wu, 2003).…”

Threshold effect and co-ordination of agri-environmental efforts

“…According to Wu (2004) recommendations, we assume that the regulator designs her scheme on a per-site basis and we focus on policy design for a given site.…”

“…If it is relevant, an extra payment may be offered to associate the contractors to monitoring tasks. In the iterative process, where previous results are taken into account, the regulator can step by step reach the optimal contract and offer it in additional zones according to the recommendations of Wu (2004). A big difficult is the common case of the delayed response of the environmental efforts which slows down the production of knowledge.…”

“…Literature provides mechanism design in some situations. For threshold effects a two stage allocation of conservation funds has been proposed to optimally target conservation efforts: in the first stage, the allocation across the eligible sites ensures that thresholds are met in every selected site while within site fund allocation only needs to be based on a physical criterion of environmental effectiveness (Wu, 2004). An important issue related to threshold effects is the uncertainty with which they are associated.…”