Why does conservation minimize opportunity costs?

Smallhorn-West, Patrick F., and Pressey, Robert L. (2022) Why does conservation minimize opportunity costs? Conservation Science and Practice, 4 (11). e12808.

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Abstract

Effective management of depleted natural resources can be achieved only through changes in human actions. Opportunity costs represent the forgone benefits that would have flowed in the absence of conservation interventions. To the extent that opportunity costs reflect lost opportunities for extractive uses (e.g., fishing or logging), and to the extent that those extractive uses present threats to nature, opportunity costs therefore reflect the positive differences for natural values that can be made through conservation management. Thus, logic dictates that, if conservationists make choices to minimize opportunity costs, they are also necessarily limiting their impact. Unfortunately, empirical evidence from many conservation contexts implies that conservationists indeed make choices consistent with an aim to minimize opportunitycosts, and hence impact. A better understanding of the relationship between opportunity costs and conservation impact will make the language used to communicate conservation progress, targets, and planning more honest and accountable and more explicitly focused on the differences our actions make.

Item ID: 76559
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 2578-4854
Keywords: biodiversity, conservation, conservation planning, counterfactual, impact evaluation, marine spatial planning, opportunity costs, protected areas, residual conservation
Copyright Information: © 2022 The Authors. Conservation Science and Practice published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Date Deposited: 19 Apr 2023 01:46
FoR Codes: 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410401 Conservation and biodiversity @ 100%
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