Dominic Moran

Contingent valuation and biodiversity: measuring the user surplus of Kenyan protected areas

The financial returns to Kenyan tourism demonstrate the importance of the countrys tourist potential to its economic development. Protected areas and their inhabitants are the principal focus of the tourist industry, the nationss main foreign exchange earner, and a source of wonder and value for a global population of non-users. It might be expected that such assets would be accorded some degree of security with sufficient funding to safeguard current and potential economic benefits. Yet park use is haphazard, and there is frequently little coincidence between those that benefit and those that pay for the continued existence of such areas. Growing economic and demographic pressures which threaten to swamp protected areas only emphasize the implicit subsidy currently paid by Kenyans to support conservation for the benefit of the world at large. In this climate the case for conservation depends on the measurement and capture of economic benefits. Using a contingent valuation survey of expressed preference this study estimates the consumer surplus attached to current non-consumptive use of protected areas by foreign visitors at some

Adaptation to increasing severity of phoma stem canker on winter oilseed rape in the UK under climate change

450 million per annum. This sum alone is more than double the best available estimate of opportunity cost and appears to justify current resource use. The estimate is additional to current financial returns from tourism and makes no allowance for other direct and indirect benefits and potential returns from consumptive uses. Measured consumer surplus contains some margin of willingness to pay that could be captured through the current fee structure. Moreover, park fees represent the most accessible market mechanism to finance revenue sharing and additional park investment before potential recourse to emerging global market institutions.

Global biodiversity priorities: A cost-effectiveness index for investments

Various adaptation strategies are available that will minimize or negate predicted climate change-related increases in yield loss from phoma stem canker in UK winter oilseed rape (OSR) production. A number of forecasts for OSR yield, national production and subsequent economic values are presented, providing estimates of impacts on both yield and value for different levels of adaptation. Under future climate change scenarios, there will be increasing pressure to maintain yields at current levels. Losses can be minimized in the short term (up to the 2020s) with a ‘low’-adaptation strategy, which essentially requires some farmer-led changes towards best management practices. However, the predicted impacts of climate change can be negated and, in most cases, improved upon, with ‘high’-adaptation strategies. This requires increased funding from both the public and private sectors and more directed efforts at adaptation from the producer. Most literature on adaptation to climate change has had a conceptual focus with little quantification of impacts. It is argued that quantifying the impacts of adaptation is essential to provide clearer information to guide policy and industry approaches to future climate change risk.

Investing in biodiversity: an economic perspective on global priority setting

Abstract Biodiversity investment priorities are a major concern for funding agencies and parties to the Convention on Biodiversity. We present an index to rank global investments which builds on previous methods by including cost-effectiveness criteria and considering the nature of threat and success in relation to priority nations. The cost-effective priority investment index (CEPII) is used to determine regional rankings for countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South America and the Caribbean. Data limitations necessitate caution in the interpretation of priorities which, like other methods, are defined by subjective choice of success and threat surrogates. The index does, however, appear to have merit as a policy tool.

Societal choice and communicating the European nitrogen challenge

Biodiversity investment priorities are a major concern for funding agencies and parties to the Convention on Biodiversity. We present a cost-effectiveness index designed to rank global biodiversity investments addressing weaknesses identified in several existing procedures. First, we explicitly address the issue of cost. Biodiversity conservation can be expensive -- ensuring that money is efficiently spent is important if conserving maximum biodiversity is an objective. Second, a high degree of threat to biodiversity is commonly accepted as constituting the principal reason for intervention and a basis for prioritization. The possibility that a high degree of threat might constitute a reason for non-intervention is rarely considered. The index presented in this study seeks to address these shortcomings by incorporating biodiversity ‘cost’, as measured by investment, and biodiversity ‘benefit’, as measured by a representative biodiversity indicator, species, richness. These elements form the basis of the cost -- benefit ratio needed for cost-effectiveness analysis. Investment in biodiversity is affected by issues of vulnerability (threat) and viability (success). A successful investment intervention will, however, depend on the probability or likelihood of success and the degree of threat prevalent in a particular country. These are integrated into the index as probabilities which will influence the amount of biodiversity ‘saved’ by an intervention. We apply the index using data for the Asia – Pacific region, to provide a cost-effective priority investment index (CEPII) ranking by country. Acute data limitations at the global level particularly in applying complementarity, necessitate caution in the interpretation of the index which, like other methods, requires some subjective choice of success and threat surrogates. The index continues the task of combining scientific and socioeconomic criteria relevant to global priorities.

The Economics of Biological Diversity Conservation

Nature of the problem (science/management/policy) Increased public and institutional awareness of both the benefi ts and threats of nitrogen has the potential to greatly increase the effi cacy • of nitrogen policy. Insuffi cient recognition of the fi nancial, behavioural and cultural barriers to achieving an optimal nitrogen future risks policy antago• nisms and failure. Here we examine some of the key societal levers for and barriers to achieving an optimal nitrogen future in Europe, drawing lessons • from the more-developed societal and policy challenge of climate change mitigation.

Integrating quantitative and qualitative data in assessing the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation programmes

Economics is about choice. In a world where resources are finite relative to the demands that human beings make on them, choice is unavoidable. We cannot have everything. Choosing is the same as “trading off,” balancing the net gains from one course of action against an alternative action. The action of conserving biological diversity is not immune from this problem of making choices, although, as we shall see, some conservation literature appears to deny the choice, while some of it argues that the choice is there but that the tradeoff in favor of diversity destruction is unacceptable biological diversity is somehow “special.” If choice is inevitable, if we cannot retain all the diversity that there is, how should such choices be made? What should be conserved and where? Few problems in economics are more complex than making choices in the context of biodiversity and no economist would argue that the problem is resolved. Nonetheless, economics offers some insights into biodiversity conservation policy and these are worth exploring.

Erratum: The impact of climate change on disease constraints on production of oilseed rape (vol 2, pg 143, 2010)

Globally, most biodiversity conservation programmes are not currently evaluated in terms of their costs and benefits, or their rate of return on the original investment. Assessing the cost-effectiveness of such schemes is challenging as the relationship between spending and the effectiveness of conservation is dependent on many biological and socio-economic factors. Here, we evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a selection of species and habitat conservation schemes undertaken through the Scotland Rural Development Programme. We use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, based on expert knowledge, to estimate effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different schemes and understand variations in the results. Our findings highlight a lack of geographical targeting in terms of where the funding might achieve the most conservation benefit, which may be contributing to high costs per unit of effectiveness. Recommendations include the need for improved advice on appropriate management and monitoring programmes that are linked closely to objectives. Conservation schemes within Scotland were used as the focus of the study, but the approaches used, interpretations drawn and improvements identified could be applied to any regional, national or international biodiversity conservation programmes. Cost and effectiveness data can be subject to a high degree of uncertainty and hence any cost-effectiveness estimate is subject to a number of caveats. There is therefore a need to focus not only on improving the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation programmes, but also to improve the robustness of cost-effectiveness assessments, in terms of data availability and accuracy and improved monitoring of the outcomes of interventions.

The Economic Value of Biodiversity.

The authors would like to correct a series of errors printed in the above paper. Due to a mistake in a table of official figures with respect to land use in the UK, the figure used for the acreage of oilseed rape produced for Scotland should have been ‘35 780 ha’ and not ‘398 720 ha’ (Table 4). Thus data quoted in the “Results” section of this paper that include this erroneous data (i.e. any “Scottish data” or “total UK” data) are also erroneous by an order of magnitude. Data in the last three lines of the following tables should now read as follows. Overall, this does not affect the main conclusions of the paper. However, the “Abstract” should now state that the value of the crop (if stem canker and light leaf spot were effectively controlled) was predicted to increase by £2.5 M in Scotland (rather than £28 M) by 2050 under a high emissions scenario and that under the same scenario, UK disease losses were predicted to increase by £30 M (rather than £50 M).

The Economic Value of Biodiversity

The authors show how cost-benefit techniques can be applied to biodiversity and how they provide a measure of the efficiency of conservation techniques. Only if biodiversity conservation passes a basic economic test such as cost-benefit analysis is it likely to be incorporated into policy. Written with great clarity and accessibility, the book will be invaluable to policy-makers and others grappling with this subject, and is also a very suitable introdution and course-book for students of economics and environmental studies.