Money for Nothing? A Call for Empirical Evaluation of Biodiversity Conservation Investments

By Paul J. Ferraro, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak. PLoS Biology, 2006

1,350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The field of conservation policy must adopt state-of-the-art program evaluation methods to determine what works, and when, if we are to stem the global decline of biodiversity and improve the effectiveness of conservation investments.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f20e461996d6bb92ffd085d5232e5bf315fb77d4

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Citations in the corpus

Can the poor participate in payments for environmental services? Lessons from the Silvopastoral Project in Nicaragua (2008, background): “The main intended purpose of this group was to attempt to distinguish project-induced land use changes from changes induced by other factors, as recommended by Ferraro and Pattanayak (2006). Upon analysis, however, control group members were found to differ from participants in many important charac”
Using perceptions as evidence to improve conservation and environmental management (2016, neutral): “…and evaluation is part of a broader trend toward evidence-based conservation (Sutherland 2003; Sutherland et al. 2004; Mathevet & Mauchamp 2005; Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006; Segan et al. 2011; Miteva et al. 2012; Cook et al. 2013; Pullin et al. 2013), which is accompanied by bold claims that…”
The Evidence Base for Environmental and Socioeconomic Impacts of “Sustainable” Certification (2010, neutral): “Three principal approaches to constructing a credible counterfactual have been used (Ferraro 2009; Greenstone and Gayer 2007; Ferraro and Pattanayak 2006; Frondel and Schmidt”
Genetic census reveals increased but uneven growth of a critically endangered mountain gorilla population (2013, background): “Such monitoring can serve as a measure of both the intensity of threats to the population and the effectiveness of various conservation strategies being implemented (Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006).”
Efforts going to the dogs? Evaluating attempts to re-introduce endangered wild dogs in South Africa (2007, background): “The absence of rigorous evaluations has been identified as a major obstacle in promoting conservation biology as a scientific discipline (Kleiman et al . 2000; Stem et al . 2005; Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006 ).”
Diminishing return on investment for biodiversity data in conservation planning (2008, background): “However, decisions regarding the allocation of resources between different actions are rarely explicit, although calls for improved accountability in conservation are becoming increasingly commonplace (Cleary 2006; Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006).”
Is conservation triage just smart decision making? (2008, neutral): “Uncertainty around whether an action will achieve its stated goal is arguably the most overlooked parameter in conservation investments [ 33 ].”
Advancing Conservation by Understanding and Influencing Human Behavior (2017, methodology): “Evidence from exist- ing studies should be carefully considered on the basis of strength of inference and applicability to the context at hand (Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006).”
Payments for biodiversity conservation in the context of weak institutions:Comparison of three programs from Cambodia? (2010, neutral): “Understanding whether these programs are effective at delivering conservation will require a counterfactual comparison once they have been in operation for several years, as suggested by Ferraro and Pattanayak (2006).”
Mainstreaming Impact Evaluation in Nature Conservation (2016, background): “Conservation science is only slowly beginning to build a body of evidence on the impact of conservation policies (Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006; Fisher et al. 2014).”