Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions, and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost-effective conservation.

Estimating the economic benefits and costs of highly‐protected marine protected areas

“…There is a general need for government and fisher records to be readily available so that community benefits and industry baselines regarding catch levels are known. Finally, an increase in non-market valuation studies would greatly ( Iacona et al (2018) expand our understanding of how MPAs can contribute welfare improvements. We have emphasized that economic assessment of MPAs is not just about estimating costs.…”

“…Uptake of cost reporting standards as outlined by Iacona et al. () would increase standardization, and hence access and usability, of MPA costs.…”

“…The majority of existing MPAs are quite small, and their costs are of limited relevance to larger MPAs, such as those planned for the Coral Sea (Ban et al 2011). Uptake of cost reporting standards as outlined by Iacona et al (2018) would increase standardization, and hence access and usability, of MPA costs.…”

Predicting intervention priorities for wildlife conflicts

“…Likewise, although we instructed respondents to ignore the issue of resources, it is possible that perceived differences in management costs (Iacona et al. ) may have tacitly influenced decisions. Similarly, although our sample size is appropriate, our conclusions are limited to generalizations about largely Anglo–European sample, which reflects the Anglo–European bias in conservation‐conflict research (Baynham‐Herd et al.…”

Bridging the research‐implementation gap requires engagement from practitioners

“…Part of the challenge in using these data is that they are not easily mined due to the lack of common reporting standards. Here we echo the call for standardized reporting of the costs of interventions made by Iacona et al (2018). Fully harnessing the benefits of monitoring and evaluation data requires analysis of as large a body of implementation experience as possible in order to provide robust guidance to inform future programming decisions.…”