Cost of conservation inaction

About

Conservation actions for the environment are critical to maintaining nature’s benefits. Conservation actions can include endangered species recovery, invasive species management, habitat restoration, land/ocean protection, and other interventions. These actions can be costly both in time and resources. Limited budgets, competing conservation needs, and uncertainty often mean that conservation actions do not occur until environmental impacts are widespread and unequivocal. Such inaction exacerbates ecological impacts and suppresses provisioning of ecosystem goods and services, causing losses. The eventual conservation action is also more costly to implement. Taking action at earlier time stages may reduce the cost of a conservation action and lead to enhanced delivery of services. We aim to develop a quantitative framework to describe the cost of inaction, delayed action, and/or insufficient action. Our aim is to help decision-makers decide when the right time to take action is, how strongly to respond, and how much they stand to lose by delaying action. Given the breadth and complexity of the problem, we propose to start with a focus on habitat loss and ecological restoration. We will generalize from there, as appropriate.

Approach

The goal of this project is to develop a deterministic model of conservation inaction. General insights towards extending the model to specific conservation challenges – e.g., habitat loss, species loss – will be considered. This project draws on and extends existing work presented in Danziger and Plantinga (in prep). Specifically, this effort will use a similar deterministic model and simulation , but simplify the Danziger and Plantinga (in prep) that includes patch-specific growth. The analysis will derive a shadow value, as in the Danziger and Plantinga model, which is defined as the present value sum of avoided damage from conservation. The model will consider various underlying system states (i.e., habitat loss rates) to identify when a conservation decision maker should act, how much conservation should be undertaken (i.e., how much area is restored), and how much each year of inaction will cost them. Ultimately, this effort will provide foundational knowledge to understand the tradeoffs faced by conservation practitioners to maximize conservation opportunities and motivate conservation action.

Partners

This project is funded by The Nature Conservancy and conducted in collaboration with Darcy Bradley and Jono Wilson.