Tigers, markets and palm oil: market potential for conservation

Perceived Consequences: General or Specific? The Case of Palm Oil-Free Products

Palm oil production and consumption involve several consequences, the perception of which are significant factors that influence consumer behavior. The aim of our research is to explore which health, environmental, or social consequences associated with palm oil influence consumers most in their behavior to avoid palm oil. We examined the three risk types from two approaches: from the viewpoint of generally perceived consequences, and the viewpoint of consequences perceived specifically in relation to palm oil. We collected data through an online consumer survey (n = 336), and we applied the method of structural equation modeling to achieve our research aim. According to our results, depending on the approach, all three consequence types influence consumer purchase intentions. Of them, the perceived effects of palm oil on health have the strongest influence on consumption intent, followed by environmental damage caused by palm oil production. The effect of general health consequences show indirect significance through information seeking, which also indicates the importance of the approach to consequence perception. Indirectly or directly, only general social consequences influence purchase intent. Our research suggests that companies developing palm oil-free products could benefit from a label on the product stating their palm oil-free nature.

No Palm Oil or Certified Sustainable Palm Oil? Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences and the Role of Information

Public concerns about the adverse effects of palm oil production and consumption have contributed both to the development of certification standards for sustainable palm oil and to the promotion of palm-oil-free products. While research on consumer preferences for palm oil is growing, potential trade-offs between these two options—products containing certified palm oil versus palm-oil-free products—are still largely unexplored. Focusing on this research gap, a discrete choice experiment involving chocolate cookies was implemented as part of a web survey among consumers in Germany. Results indicate that consumers on average prefer palm-oil-free cookies, although a latent class analysis identifies several consumer segments that differ in terms of preferences, attitudes, and characteristics. Many respondents are highly price-sensitive. After the provision of additional information, stated preferences for certified palm oil increase, but four out of five consumer segments still prefer palm-oil-free products. Prevailing health concerns and a potential lack of trust in certification might explain this choice behavior. As alternatives to palm oil are not necessarily more sustainable, initiatives supporting the uptake of certified sustainable palm oil should be further strengthened. Targeted information campaigns might be a suitable instrument to raise awareness and increase knowledge about palm oil.

Governing trade-offs in ecosystem services and disservices to achieve human-wildlife coexistence

Sustaining wildlife populations, which provide both ecosystem services and disservices, represents a worldwide conservation challenge. The ecosystem services and Ostrom's social-ecological systems frameworks have been adopted across natural and social sciences to characterize benefits from nature. Despite their generalizability, individually they do not include explicit tools for addressing the sustainable management of many wildlife populations. For instance, Ostrom's framework does not specifically address competing perspectives on wildlife, whereas the ecosystem services framework provides a limited representation of the social and governance context wherein such competing perspectives are embedded. We developed a unified social-ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services (SEEDS) that advances both frameworks by explicitly acknowledging the importance of competing wildlife perspectives embedded in the social and governance contexts. The SEEDS framework emulates the hierarchical structure of Ostrom's social-ecological systems, but adds subsystems reflecting heterogeneous stakeholder views and experiences of wildlife-based services and disservices. To facilitate operationalizing SEEDS and further broader analyses across human-wildlife systems, we devised a list of variables to describe SEEDS subsystems, such as types and level of services and disservices, cost and benefit sharing, and social participation of stakeholders. Steps to implement SEEDS involve engaging local communities and stakeholders to define the subsystems, analyze interactions and outcomes, and identify leverage points and actions to remedy unwanted outcomes. These steps connect SEEDS with other existing approaches in social-ecological research and can guide analyses across systems or within individual systems to provide new insights and management options for sustainable human-wildlife coexistence.

International trade causes large net economic losses in tropical countries via the destruction of ecosystem services

Despite the large implications of the use of tropical land for exports ("land absorption") on ecosystem services (ES) and global biodiversity conservation, the magnitude of these externalities is not known. We quantify the net value of ES lost in tropical countries as a result of cropland, forestland and pastureland absorption for exports after deducting ES gains through imports ("land displacement"). We find that net ES gains occur only in 7 out of the 41 countries and regions considered. We estimate global annual net losses of over 1.7 x 10(12) international dollars (I$) (I$1.1 x 10(12) if carbon-related services are not considered). After deducting the benefits from agricultural, forest and livestock rents in land replacing tropical forests, the net annual losses are I$1.3 and I$0.7 x 10(12), respectively. The results highlight the large magnitude of tropical ES losses through international trade that are not compensated by the rents of land uses in absorbed land.

Conserving tropical biodiversity via market forces and spatial targeting

The recent report from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity [(2010) Global Biodiversity Outlook 3] acknowledges that ongoing biodiversity loss necessitates swift, radical action. Protecting undisturbed lands, although vital, is clearly insufficient, and the key role of unprotected, private land owned is being increasingly recognized. Seeking to avoid common assumptions of a social planner backed by government interventions, the present work focuses on the incentives of the individual landowner. We use detailed data to show that successful conservation on private land depends on three factors: conservation effectiveness (impact on target species), private costs (especially reductions in production), and private benefits (the extent to which conservation activities provide compensation, for example, by enhancing the value of remaining production). By examining the high-profile issue of palm-oil production in a major tropical biodiversity hotspot, we show that the levels of both conservation effectiveness and private costs are inherently spatial; varying the location of conservation activities can radically change both their effectiveness and private cost implications. We also use an economic choice experiment to show that consumers' willingness to pay for conservation-grade palm-oil products has the potential to incentivize private producers sufficiently to engage in conservation activities, supporting vulnerable International Union for Conservation of Nature Red Listed species. However, these incentives vary according to the scale and efficiency of production and the extent to which conservation is targeted to optimize its cost-effectiveness. Our integrated, interdisciplinary approach shows how strategies to harness the power of the market can usefully complement existing--and to-date insufficient--approaches to conservation.

Using a systematic approach to select flagship species for bird conservation

Conservation marketing campaigns that focus on flagship species play a vital role in biological diversity conservation because they raise funds and change people's behavior. However, most flagship species are selected without considering the target audience of the campaign, which can hamper the campaign's effectiveness. To address this problem, we used a systematic and stakeholder-driven approach to select flagship species for a conservation campaign in the Serra do Urubu in northeastern Brazil. We based our techniques on environmental economic and marketing methods. We used choice experiments to examine the species attributes that drive preference and latent-class models to segment respondents into groups by preferences and socioeconomic characteristics. We used respondent preferences and information on bird species inhabiting the Serra do Urubu to calculate a flagship species suitability score. We also asked respondents to indicate their favorite species from a set list to enable comparison between methods. The species' traits that drove audience preference were geographic distribution, population size, visibility, attractiveness, and survival in captivity. However, the importance of these factors differed among groups and groups differed in their views on whether species with small populations and the ability to survive in captivity should be prioritized. The popularity rankings of species differed between approaches, a result that was probably related to the different ways in which the 2 methods measured preference. Our new approach is a transparent and evidence-based method that can be used to refine the way stakeholders are engaged in the design of conservation marketing campaigns.