The Economics of Designing Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation: A Call to Integrate Pre- and Post-implementation Human Threats into Planning

Heidi Albers and Kailin Kroetz

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2026, vol. 20, issue 1, 58 - 78

Abstract: Human threats to biodiversity are the impetus for establishing protected areas (PAs) to conserve biodiversity. Current international goals aim to cover 30 percent of terrestrial and marine areas with PAs by 2030. Yet, despite the importance of human behavior in driving threats to biodiversity, relatively little economic analysis informs the design of PA networks. We describe the PA network design decision as a constrained optimization problem, which can include human responses to PAs that threaten biodiversity both within PAs and across broader seascapes and landscapes. This approach differs from most of the conservation planning literature by putting human actions at the center of PA network design decisions. We argue that PA network efficiency can be improved through design frameworks that incorporate predictions of how human behavior will respond to PAs. The variety of threats to biodiversity posed by people’s actions in marine and terrestrial settings, and across country income levels, suggests the need to include the range of human responses to a fuller set of PA network design choices, beyond decisions about the siting of PAs. We discuss possible steps to link the PA network design models discussed here to empirical analysis and implementation.

Date: 2026
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