IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Boyd, J.; Epanchin-Niell, R.; Siikam„ki, J. | |
| Conservation planning: a review of return on investment analysis | |
| 2015 Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (9): 23-42 | |
Systematic conservation planning has a long history, including early twentieth century efforts in Europe and the United States to identify public lands for protection and acquisition and to achieve soil conservation. Today, there is a wide range of domestic and international conservation planning activities-often led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These efforts are aimed primarily at stemming biodiversity losses through land acquisitions and other conservation actions. Conservation organizations face challenging decisions as they seek to protect, restore, and manage natural resources. Which conservation targets are the most important? How can they achieve the most conservation with a limited budget? Early conservation planning relied extensively on expert assessment to identify and evaluate potential conservation targets, often using some form of scoring method. However, in the last 25 years there has been a shift toward use of more quantitative, data-intensive methods. Among the wide range of approaches for assessing conservation projects, return on investment (ROI) analysis is the most economic form of evaluation. Conservation ROI analysis quantitatively measures the costs, benefits, and risks of investments, which allows conservation organizations to rank or prioritize them. More specifically, ROI-based conservation analysis maximizes a measure of conservation benefits for a given level of expenditures or minimizes the costs of achieving a predetermined conservation goal. To date, single-objective ROI analysis, which typically derives a portfolio of preferred conservation actions based on a calculation of benefits per dollar invested, is the most common form of conservation ROI analysis. However, the conservation community's interest in multi-objective ROI analysis is increasing. This article reviews the current conservation ROI and related literatures. Our goal is to summarize the state of the art in terms of data, methods, and results and to identify strategies for improving the scope, accuracy, and applicability of conservation ROI analysis. We also describe the ways in which ROI analysis can be extended beyond biodiversity conservation outcomes. We begin by highlighting the advantages of including costs as a decision factor in conservation analysis, including the costs of land acquisition, foregone alternative land uses, and resource restoration and management. We then review the growing literature on benefit-cost based ROI, including how studies define and measure the conservation objective, the relevant baselines, the type of conservation investments being evaluated, and their investment costs. Next we discuss multi-objective ROI analysis, including analysis of returns to conservation based on ecosystem services. We conclude with a summary and brief discussion of key directions for future research. |
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