Time to accept conservation triage

Ethics of Conservation Triage

Conservation triage seems to be at a stalemate between those who accept triage based on utilitarian rationalization, and those that reject it based on a number of ethical principles. We argue that without considered attention to the ethics of conservation triage we risk further polarization in the field of conservation. We draw lessons from the medical sector, where triage is more intuitive and...

Editorial: Triage in Conservation

Subpopulation triage: how to allocate conservation effort among populations.

Threatened species often exist in a small number of isolated subpopulations. Given limitations on conservation spending, managers must choose from strategies that range from managing just one subpopulation and risking all other subpopulations to managing all subpopulations equally and poorly, thereby risking the loss of all subpopulations. We took an economic approach to this problem in an effo...

Is conservation triage just smart decision making?

Conservation efforts and emergency medicine face comparable problems: how to use scarce resources wisely to conserve valuable assets. In both fields, the process of prioritising actions is known as triage. Although often used implicitly by conservation managers, scientists and policymakers, triage has been misinterpreted as the process of simply deciding which assets (e.g. species, habitats) wi...

Measuring the Local Opportunity Costs of Conservation: A Provision Point Mechanism for Willingness-to-Accept

University of Copenhagen, and to Ian Lange and two referees for very careful comments on an earlier version. Abstract Protected areas are employed worldwide as a means of conserving biodiversity. Unfortunately, restricting access to such areas imposes opportunity costs on local people who have traditionally relied on access to obtain resources such as fuelwood and bushmeat. We use contingent va...