Agricultural rent and cost of conservation
Research Background
International conservation organisations have identified priority areas for biodiversity conservation. These global-scale prioritisations affect the distribution of funds for conservation interventions. As each organisation has a different focus, each prioritisation scheme is determined by different decision criteria and the resultant priority areas vary considerably. However, little is known about how the priority areas will respond to the impacts of climate change.
Research Objectives
We model the opportunity costs of conservation by estimating the flow of economic benefits derived from crops and livestock. This theoretical framework is commonly used in the agricultural economics literature when modeling the rental value of agricultural land (Goodwin et al., 2003). In addition, using agricultural land values as proxies of conservation costs has precedent in the conservation planning literature (Ando et al., 1998, Polasky et al., 2001), since they represent the income forgone if land is conserved instead of cultivated, and are capitalized into agricultural land values (Goodwin et al., 2003).
We present an integrated biological and socioeconomic approach for identifying biodiversity priority areas, and we redefine the mammal priorities set by Ceballos et al. We aim to (i) identify priority areas (hereafter termed cells, see Materials and Methods) that represent 10% of the geographic range of all mammal species while minimizing conflict with cropped areas, (ii) identify priority cells that achieve the same conservation goals but that minimize the financial loss of agricultural opportunities (both cropping and grazing, see Materials and Methods), (iii) evaluate the spatial allocation of current funding from international conservation agencies, and (iv) identify immediate priorities for conservation as those cells that are most important for cost-effective mammal conservation, underfunded, and subject to the greatest threat of habitat loss.
