Ecological and economic trade-offs between amount and spatial aggregation of conservation and the cost-effective design of coordination incentives

Martin Drechsler

Ecological Economics, 2023, vol. 213, issue C

Abstract: To counter not only the continuous loss but also the fragmentation of species habitats, coordination incentives (CI) have been proposed to incentivise the spatial aggregation of conservation efforts. An important issue is the cost-effective design of these instruments. Two main types of CI, the agglomeration bonus and the agglomeration payment, are analysed with stylised models. Their ecological effects are assessed through a metapopulation simulation model. Rather than choosing the usual approach and analysing the joint ecological-economic model, I analyse the ecological and economic sub-models separately and join the results within an economic production theory framework in which production factors (here, the proportion and aggregation of conserved land parcels) are financed under a budget- or cost constraint and generate an output (here, metapopulation viability). This decomposition of the ecological-economic analyses allows highlighting the ecological and economic trade-offs between proportion and spatial aggregation of conservation and generating a more general understanding of the budget- and cost-effectiveness of CI. Results include, among others, that the agglomeration payment is never more budget- and cost-effective than the agglomeration bonus and that in the agglomeration bonus the budget-effective level of spatial aggregation is lower than the cost-effective level.

Keywords: Agglomeration bonus; Agglomeration Payment; Coordination Incentives; Cost-Effectiveness; Ecological-Economic Model; Economic Production Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:213:y:2023:i:c:s0921800923002112

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107948

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