PLOS Biology: Mapping the Economic Costs and Benefits of Conservation

Resources for biodiversity conservation are severely limited, requiring strategic investment. Understanding both the economic benefits and costs of conserving ecosystems will help to allocate scarce dollars most efficiently. However, although cost-benefit analyses are common in many areas of policy, they are not typically used in conservation planning. We conducted a spatial evaluation of the costs and benefits of conservation for a landscape in the Atlantic forests of Paraguay. We considered five ecosystem services (i.e., sustainable bushmeat harvest, sustainable timber harvest, bioprospecting for pharmaceutical products, existence value, and carbon storage in aboveground biomass) and compared them to estimates of the opportunity costs of conservation. We found a high degree of spatial variability in both costs and benefits over this relatively small (~3,000 km ) landscape. Benefits exceeded costs in some areas, with carbon storage dominating the ecosystem service values and swamping opportunity costs. Other benefits associated with conservation were more modest and exceeded costs only in protected areas and indigenous reserves. We used this cost-benefit information to show that one potential corridor between two large forest patches had net benefits that were three times greater than two otherwise similar alternatives. Spatial cost-benefit analysis can powerfully inform conservation planning, even though the availability of relevant data may be limited, as was the case in our study area. It can help us understand the synergies between biodiversity conservation and economic development when the two are indeed aligned and to clearly understand the trade-offs when they are not. Citation: Naidoo R, Ricketts TH (2006) Mapping the Economic Costs and Benefits of Conservation. PLoS Biol 4(11): e360. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040360 Academic Editor: Walt Reid, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, United States of America Received: April 13, 2006; Accepted: August 28, 2006; Published: October 31, 2006 Copyright: © 2006 Naidoo and Ricketts. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: RN was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a WWF Science Fellowship. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abbreviations: CDM, Clean Development Mechanism; WTP, willingness to pay