Economics and Land‐Use Change in Prioritizing Private Land Conservation

: Incentive-based strategies such as conservation easements and short-term management agreements are popular tools for conserving biodiversity on private lands. Billions of dollars are spent by government and private conservation organizations to support land conservation. Although much of conservation biology focuses on reserve design, these methods are often ineffective at optimizing the protection of biological benefits for conservation programs. Our review of the recent literature on protected-area planning identifies some of the reasons why. We analyzed the site-selection process according to three important components: biological benefits, land costs, and likelihood of land-use change. We compared our benefit-loss-cost targeting approach with more conventional strategies that omit or inadequately address either land costs or likelihood of land-use change. Our proposed strategy aims to minimize the expected loss in biological benefit due to future land-use conversion while considering the full or partial costs of land acquisition. The implicit positive correlation between the likelihood of land-use conversion and cost of land protection means high-vulnerability sites with suitable land quality are typically more expensive than low-vulnerability sites with poor land quality. Therefore, land-use change and land costs need to be addressed jointly to improve spatial targeting strategies for land conservation. This approach can be extended effectively to land trusts and other institutions implementing conservation programs. Resumen: Las estrategias basadas en incentivos, como los derechos de conservacion y los acuerdos de manejo a corto plazo, son herramientas populares para conservar la biodiversidad en tierras privadas. Las organizaciones conservacionistas gubernamentales y privadas gastan billones de dolares para financiar la conservacion. Aunque la mayor parte de la biologia de la conservacion se centra en el diseno de reservas, estos metodos a menudo no son efectivos para la optima proteccion de los beneficios biologicos de los programas de conservacion. Nuestra revision de la literatura reciente sobre planificacion de areas protegidas identifica algunas de las razones de lo anterior. Analizamos los procesos de seleccion de sitios en funcion de tres componentes importantes: beneficios biologicos, costo de las tierras y la probabilidad de cambio en el uso de suelo. Comparamos nuestro enfoque en el beneficio-perdida-costo con metodos mas tradicionales que omiten, o abordan inadecuadamente, el costo de las tierras y/o la probabilidad de cambio en el uso de suelo. La estrategia que proponemos trata de minimizar la perdida esperada del beneficio biologico debido a la conversion del uso de suelo en el futuro al tiempo que considera los costos parciales o totales de la adquisicion de tierras. La correlacion positiva implicita entre la probabilidad de conversion en el uso de suelo y el costo de la proteccion de tierras significa que los stios altamente vulnerables con tierras de buena calidad tipicamente son mas caros que los sitios de baja vulnerabilidad con tierras de baja calidad. Por lo tanto, se requiere que el cambio en el uso del suelo y el costo de las tierras sean atendidos conjuntamente para mejorar las estrategias para la conservacion de tierras. Este metodo se puede extender con efectividad a consorcios y otras instituciones que llevan a cabo programas de conservacion.

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