NDLI: Does proactive biodiversity conservation save costs?

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Drechsler, Martin Eppink, Florian V. Wätzold, Frank
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	Ecologists usually argue for a proactive approach to species conservation—it should start before a species is endangered and under substantial risk of extinction. In reality, however, conservation often only starts when species populations are already in a critical state. This may be the result of a policy process in which those actors who see only little or no benefits from conserving species try to delay conservation as long as possible to avoid its cost. A frequent consequence is that populations decline to critical levels so that once conservation policies set in due to legal obligations, political pressure or any other reason, additional conservation measures are required to re-establish the populations. We show that the costs associated with this policy process may be higher than those of a proactive policy. This is somewhat surprising because the costs of maintaining populations at a level at which they are not endangered may occur over a longer period. However, the costs of bringing species populations back to those levels may be so high that they outweigh the costs of the proactive approach. We develop simple cost functions that capture the main economic and ecological parameters relevant to our argument and apply them for an assessment of the costs of common hamster (Cricetus cricetus) conservation in the region of Mannheim, Germany. We find that a proactive approach would have saved between €17.2 and €36.4 mn compared to the existing policy where conservation was delayed until legal requirements forced local policy makers to implement a comprehensive hamster protection programme.
Starting Page	1045
Ending Page	1055
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09603115
Journal	Biodiversity and Conservation
Volume Number	20
Issue Number	5
e-ISSN	15729710
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2011-02-16
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Common hamster Conservation management Conservation costs Cost assessment Proactive conservation Plant Sciences Tree Biology Evolutionary Biology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
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