Projecting the performance of conservation interventions 1 Authors: 2

23 Successful decision-making for environmental management requires evidence of the performance and 24 efficacy of proposed conservation interventions. Projecting the future impacts of prospective conservation 25 policies and programs is challenging due to a range of complex ecological, economic, social and ethical 26 factors, and in particular the need to extrapolate models to novel contexts. Yet many extrapolation techniques 27 currently employed are limited by unfounded assumptions of causality and a reliance on potentially biased 28 inferences drawn from limited data. We show how these restrictions can be overcome by established and 29 emerging techniques from causal inference, scenario analysis, systematic review, expert elicitation, and global 30 sensitivity analysis. These identify useful 2013; 2014). We see many opportunities to this the domain

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