Cost Effective Conservation Planning: Twenty Lessons from Economics

Joshua Duke, Steven Dundas and Kent Messer ()

No 12-01, Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics

Abstract: Economists advocate that the billions of public dollars spent on conservation should be allocated to achieve the largest possible social benefit. This is what we term “cost-effective conservation”-- a process that incorporates both benefits and costs that are measured with money. This controversial proposition has been poorly understood and not implemented by conservation planners. Drawing from evidence from the largest conservation programs in the United States, this paper seeks to improve the communication between economists and planners and overcome resistance to cost-effective conservation by addressing the open questions that likely drive skepticism among non-economists and by identifying best practices for project selection. We first delineate project-selection strategies and compare them to optimization. Then we synthesize the body of established research findings from economics into 20 practical lessons. Based on theory, policy considerations, and empirical evidence, these lessons illustrate the potential gains from improving practices related to cost-effective selection and also address how to overcome landowner-incentive challenges that face programs.

Keywords: conservation planning; cost-effectiveness; nonmarket valuation; benefit cost targeting; optimization; prioritization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q18 Q24 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-ppm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://graduate.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/file ... 12/UD-WP-2012-01.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://graduate.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2012/UD-WP-2012-01.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2012/UD-WP-2012-01.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dlw:wpaper:12-01.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Saul Hoffman ().