Land market feedbacks can undermine biodiversity conservation

Abstract

The full or partial purchase of land has become a cornerstone of efforts to conserve biodiversity in countries with strong private property rights. Methods used to target areas for acquisition typically ignore land market dynamics. We show how conservation purchases affect land prices and generate feedbacks that can undermine conservation goals, either by displacing development toward biologically valuable areas or by accelerating its pace. The impact of these market feedbacks on the effectiveness of conservation depends on the ecological value of land outside nature reserves. Traditional, noneconomic approaches to site prioritization should perform adequately in places where land outside reserves supports little biodiversity. However, these approaches will perform poorly in locations where the countryside surrounding reserves is important for species' persistence. Conservation investments can sometimes even be counterproductive, condemning more species than they save. Conservation is most likely to be compromised in the absence of accurate information on species distributions, which provides a strong argument for improving inventories of biodiversity. Accounting for land market dynamics in conservation planning is crucial for making smart investment decisions.conservation planning ͉ reserve design ͉ site selection ͉ development pressure ͉ habitat destruction

Ecosystem service benefits of contrasting conservation strategies in a human-dominated region

“…Moilanen et al 2005) and human responses to changes in conservation policy (e.g. Armsworth et al 2006) would also be very interesting, but is beyond the scope of this study. Finally, finer-scale, more mechanistic analyses of which land cover types provide the four ecosystem services considered here would be very useful.…”

Linking social norms to efficient conservation investment in payments for ecosystem services

“…Like human population, per unit area costs of effective conservation also vary enormously across different places (17). The efficiency of conservation investments can be improved by considering economic conditions, such as land prices, at global, regional, and local scales (18)(19)(20)(21). Although much has been learned about the effects of these socioeconomic factors on the efficiency of conservation investments (11,12,(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20), little is known about the effects of social norms at the neighborhood level (22).…”

State‐level variation in conservation investment by a major nongovernmental organization

“…Even then, the very large area of Maine protected over the study period was accounted for, in part, by two sets of easement transactions in 2001 and 2003. Very large, one-off investments in habitat conservation like this, introduce a particular set of problems to conservation planning (Armsworth et al 2006) and future studies that focused exclusively on these large deals may be well warranted, because they have continued to be important after 2003 (Kareiva, unpublished data).…”

“…Recent theory emphasizes that alongside biological value, accounting for social and economic factors in priority setting can improve effectiveness (O'Connor et al 2003;Armsworth et al 2006;Knight & Cowling 2007). Conservation theory will have a greater impact if it more accurately reflects the choices and constraints that practitioners face in decision making.…”