What drives the designation of protected areas? Accounting for spatial dependence using a composite marginal likelihood approach

Anne Nobel, Sebastien Lizin and Robert Malina

Ecological Economics, 2023, vol. 205, issue C

Abstract: Previous research indicates that policymakers make biodiversity conservation decisions with the goal of minimizing opportunity costs, as opposed to balancing conservation benefits and opportunity costs. However, such research used coarse biodiversity data and did not consider spatial dependence in observed conservation decisions. The present study estimates conservation choice models for two European countries (Spain and Italy) that, for the first time, include fine-resolution indicators of biodiversity conservation benefits and opportunity costs, and that account for spatial dependence using a pairwise composite marginal likelihood approach. For the preferred model specifications, we find that a 1% increase in species richness levels is associated with increases in the probability of protection of 0.59% and 0.22% in Spain and Italy, respectively. We also find evidence of spatial correlation and that accounting for it substantially affects the elasticity effects implied by the logit regression models. Although our findings confirm that protected area designations are consistently negatively associated with the potential for productive land-uses, local biodiversity levels may have played a larger role in protected area location decisions than suggested previously.

Keywords: Biodiversity conservation; Opportunity cost; Composite marginal likelihood; Copula; Spatial dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922003937
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:205:y:2023:i:c:s0921800922003937

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107732

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().