Eliciting diverse perspectives to prioritize community actions for biodiversity conservation

Communities have a strong role in protecting biodiversity. In addition to participation in restoration, a range of actions in the public or private sphere may support biodiversity. Despite this, there is a lack of clarity about what actions should be prioritized for behavior change campaigns. We developed and applied a method to prioritize community actions for biodiversity conservation that incorporates an expert-based assessment of impact and a community-informed measure of the likelihood of uptake. In stage 1, experts (n = 143) completed a survey that quantified the relative impact of actions based on best-worst scaling of perceived impact. In stage 2, surveyed community members (n = 3200) ranked the likelihood of adopting actions based on the ease or difficulty of performing each action, and the opportunity for change based on the proportion of respondents not yet engaging in each behavior. Experts gave the following actions the highest ranking for impact: voting for the environment (first), participating in restoration in ecological priority areas (second), and purchasing and protecting remnant bushland (third). When considering the disciplinary background and institutional background of experts, voting and participating in restoration activities remained in the upper ranked options. However, there was some divergence between these groups. For example, reducing beef consumption was ranked third by university-based experts but ranked 28th by experts based in state government. Overall, community members ranked the following behaviors as most likely to be adopted: following quarantine laws (first), reducing plastic use (second), and managing pets (third). Top likelihood ranking of actions was minimally affected by community characteristics (nature relatedness, gender, location). Integrating these findings, the action ranked most favorably for impact, likelihood, and opportunity was participating in restoration. Choosing actions for behavior change campaigns requires consideration of the entire social-ecological system-from social factors that enable or constrain adoption to the ecological impact of actions across relevant social and ecological contexts.

Examining Trajectories of Change for Prosperous Forest Landscapes in Cambodia

Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing rapid transition. Rural development aspirations are rising, and land use change is contributing to deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss, which threaten the future of tropical forests. Conservation initiatives must deal with complex social, political, and ecological decisions involving trade-offs between the extent of protected areas and quality of conservation. In Cambodia, smallholders and industrial economic land concessions drive deforestation and forest degradation. Rural economic benefits have not kept pace with development aspirations and smallholders are gradually expanding agriculture into protected forests. We examine the drivers and effects of rural forest landscape transitions in Cambodia to identify trade-offs between conservation and development. Using historical trends analysis and information gathered through key informant interviews, we describe how local communities perceive social and ecological changes, and examine the implications of local development aspirations for conservation. We explore three scenarios for the future of conservation in Cambodia, each with different conservation and community development outcomes. We contend that conservation efforts should focus on strengthening governance to meet social and environmental requirements for sustainable forest landscapes. We suggest potential entry points for governance improvements, including working with local decision-makers and fostering collaboration between stakeholders. There is a need for realistic priority setting in contested tropical forest landscapes. Prosperous rural economies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for conservation.

Usefulness of two bioeconomic frameworks for evaluation of community-initiated species conservation projects

Context Community-based conservation managers and their funding providers must apportion limited resources to potential projects that provide varying biodiversity benefits. Funding applicants must demonstrate that proposed projects are likely to provide positive conservation returns on investments. Aims We investigated the practical usefulness of two bioeconomic frameworks, the Project Prioritisation Protocol and the Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER) in guiding community-based conservation funding decisions and the benefits and challenges to community groups in evaluating projects using the tools. Methods We evaluated four species-based community-led conservation projects in New Zealand using the tools, and assessed the quality, relevance and potential impact of the frameworks to community conservation, including users’ perceptions of their usefulness. Key results Benefit–cost metrics from both tools indicated that all four projects would provide a low return on investment. However, both tools were highly sensitive to key assumptions about the values of conservation assets (species) being managed and the values of predicted differences made by projects. Both tools scored well against criteria used to assess their technical ‘quality’. INFFER had greater flexibility for use in different situations, but its use by community groups may be constrained by the time demands of completing a full project evaluation. Both tools can help users define problems and formulate innovative solutions through assessment of success and risk factors and the identification of project efficiencies. Conclusions Although both tools provide quantitative, transparent processes for the relative evaluation and ranking of competing projects, their sensitivities to species and/or asset valuation and benefit estimates mean that users should not accept scores and project rankings uncritically. For community groups, evaluation frameworks are likely to be useful to document costs, conservation benefits and risk factors accurately and transparently, and can encourage applicants to develop more robust approaches to project management, including the development of specific and measurable management objectives. Implications Adoption of more transparent and standardised assessment of funding applications by agencies, despite some of the drawbacks of currently available tools, would facilitate more transparent prioritisation of competing funding bids and would encourage community groups to develop a more robust approach to project design and management.

Interdisciplinarity in biodiversity project evaluation: a work in progress

A range of methodological frameworks is available to assist decision-makers with evaluations of projects concerned with biodiversity conservation (the protection, management or restoration of biodiversity), but their uptake has been relatively limited. Some researchers suggest a lack of research interest to be one contributory factor, in particular in relation to the application of interdisciplinary approaches that integrate methods from the natural and social sciences, despite the insights that such approaches can bring. We evaluated this assertion by examining the provenance of some examples of current research in this area. Specifically, we compared two exemplar papers published in a conservation journal and one in an interdisciplinary ecological economics journal. We scored the cited references in each paper according to standard subject categories. These scores were then weighted and aggregated to give an overall quantified subject category distribution for each of the three focal papers. Comparison of the three papers revealed an expected dominance of subject categories most closely aligned with ecological science. However, there were different patterns of provenance in the three papers. One paper from the conservation journal was dominated by citations of other papers in the biodiversity conservation literature. The second paper from the conservation journal and the paper from the ecological economics journal displayed similar overall patterns of disciplinary provenance, although they diverged in disciplinary provenance for the less commonly cited disciplines, such as the social sciences. Our results suggest that research in biodiversity project evaluation may be developing along at least three, relatively distinct, pathways rather than as a genuinely interconnected research theme. This is likely to hinder progress in research but also in practical application of the techniques, in terms of reducing the likelihood of identifying inadequate, inappropriate or inefficient conservation investments. There is still considerable opportunity for further collaboration in the areas of biodiversity evaluation among researchers in a range of disciplines, including ecology, economics, statistics, forestry and wildlife management. Biodiversity conservation evaluation is a growing field, but its potential is unlikely to be fulfilled unless biodiversity researchers seek to develop a more integrated community, and particularly, to learn from researchers in other disciplines where evaluation has a longer history.