Evaluating policy instruments for the conservation of biodiversity in a changing climate

Charlotte Gerling and Frank Wätzold

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Climate change is a key threat for biodiversity. In order to mitigate this threat, ecologists suggest two conservation strategies: (1) enabling a species’ migration towards areas that will become suitable for the species as climatic conditions change and (2) creating climate refugia in which the species may persist even if the surrounding landscape is no longer climatically ideal. The policy instruments that could be used to implement these conservation strategies have so far not been evaluated comprehensively from an economic perspective. We develop a conceptual evaluation framework with the criteria ecological effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and dynamic incentives, which are criteria commonly applied in the economic analysis of environmental policy instruments. For each criterion, we develop of a set of specific evaluation criteria to assess policy instruments for species conservation under climate change. We apply the framework by conducting a conceptual analysis of three types of policy instruments – land purchases, offsets and conservation payments. A key finding of our analysis is that the degree to which a policy instrument is appropriate for species conservation depends strongly on the conservation strategy chosen.

Keywords: ecological effectiveness; cost-effectiveness; dynamic incentives; enabling migration; climate refugia; habitat turnover; flexibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/95512/1/MPRA_paper_95512.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/108514/1/MPRA_paper_95512.pdf revised version (application/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:pra:mprapa:95512

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().