Building a stakeholder-led common vision increases the expected cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation

Rocío Ponce Reyes, Jennifer Firn, Sam Nicol, Iadine Chadès, Danial S Stratford, Tara G Martin, Stuart Whitten () and Josie Carwardine

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: Uniting diverse stakeholders through communication, education or building a collaborative ‘common vision’ for biodiversity management is a recommended approach for enabling effective conservation in regions with multiple uses. However, socially focused strategies such as building a collaborative vision can require sharing scarce resources (time and financial resources) with the on-ground management actions needed to achieve conservation outcomes. Here we adapt current prioritisation tools to predict the likely return on the financial investment of building a stakeholder-led vision along with a portfolio of on-ground management strategies. Our approach brings together and analyses expert knowledge to estimate the cost-effectiveness of a common vision strategy and on-ground management strategies, before any investments in these strategies are made. We test our approach in an intensively-used Australian biodiversity hotspot with 179 threatened or at-risk species. Experts predicted that an effective stakeholder vision for the region would have a relatively low cost and would significantly increase the feasibility of on-ground management strategies. As a result, our analysis indicates that a common vision is likely to be a cost-effective investment, increasing the expected persistence of threatened species in the region by 9 to 52%, depending upon the strategies implemented. Our approach can provide the maximum budget that is worth investing in building a common vision or another socially focused strategy for building support for on-ground conservation actions. The approach can assist with decisions about whether and how to allocate scarce resources amongst social and ecological actions for biodiversity conservation in other regions worldwide.

Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0218093

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218093

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