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Cheap and nasty? The potential perils of using management costs to identify global conservation priorities

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Version 1 2023-05-19, 08:23
journal contribution
posted on 2025-01-15, 00:57 authored by E McCreless, P Visconti, J Carwardine, Chris WilcoxChris Wilcox, RJ Smith
The financial cost of biodiversity conservation varies widely around the world and such costs should be considered when identifying countries to best focus conservation investments. Previous global prioritizations have been based on global models for protected area management costs, but this metric may be related to other factors that negatively influence the effectiveness and social impacts of conservation. Here we investigate such relationships and first show that countries with low predicted costs are less politically stable. Local support and capacity can mitigate the impacts of such instability, but we also found that these countries have less civil society involvement in conservation. Therefore, externally funded projects in these countries must rely on government agencies for implementation. This can be problematic, as our analyses show that governments in countries with low predicted costs score poorly on indices of corruption, bureaucratic quality and human rights. Taken together, our results demonstrate that using national-level estimates for protected area management costs to set global conservation priorities is simplistic, as projects in apparently low-cost countries are less likely to succeed and more likely to have negative impacts on people. We identify the need for an improved approach to develop global conservation cost metrics that better capture the true costs of avoiding or overcoming such problems. Critically, conservation scientists must engage with practitioners to better understand and implement context-specific solutions. This approach assumes that measures of conservation costs, like measures of conservation value, are organization specific, and would bring a much-needed focus on reducing the negative impacts of conservation to develop projects that benefit people and biodiversity.

History

Publication title

PLoS ONE

Volume

8

Issue

11

Article number

e80893

Number

e80893

Pagination

1-11

ISSN

1932-6203

Department/School

IMAS Directorate

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Publication status

  • Published

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Copyright: © 2013 McCreless et al. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Socio-economic Objectives

189999 Other environmental management not elsewhere classified

UN Sustainable Development Goals

15 Life on Land, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions