Opportunity costs: Who really pays for conservation?
By V. Adams, R. Pressey, R. Naidoo. 2010
202 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Designing conservation areas entails costs that, if considered explicitly, can be minimized while still achieving conservation targets. Here we focus on opportunity costs which measure forgone benefits from alternative land uses. Conservation planning studies often use partial estimates of costs, but the extent to which these result in actual efficiencies has not been demonstrated. Our study partitions land costs into three distinct opportunity costs to smallholder agriculture, soybean agriculture and ranching. We demonstrate that opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups can be inaccurate measures of true opportunity costs and can inadvertently shift conservation costs to affect groups of stakeholders disproportionately. Additionally, we examine how spatial correlations between costs as well as target size affect the performance of opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups as surrogate measures of true opportunity costs. We conclude that planning with opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups can result in cost burdens to other groups that could undermine the long-term success of conservation. Thus, an understanding of the spatial distributions of opportunity costs that are disaggregated to groups of stakeholders is necessary to make informed decisions about priority conservation areas.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a936be498c63ae14bcfdc0f3f34a4b22728c3a92
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In Economics and Econometrics
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Management costs for small protected areas and economies of scale in habitat conservation (2011, background): “Academic writings on conservation planning also increasingly emphasise the importance of considering the costs associated with different conservation activities (Ando et al., 1998; Polasky et al., 2001; Armsworth et al., 2006; Strange et al., 2006; Murdoch et al., 2007; Naidoo and Iwamura, 2007; Bod”
- The rise of large-scale marine protected areas: Conservation or geopolitics? (2013, background): “, 2007), the conservation costs of MPAs (Adams et al., 2010; Balmford et al., 2004; Ban et al., 2011; Ban and Klein, 2009; McCrea-Strub et al., 2011), and the governance analysis of largescale marine areas (Day and Dobbs, 2013; Fidelman et al.”