Katrina Davis

Equity trade-offs in conservation decision making

Conservation decisions increasingly involve multiple environmental and social objectives, which result in complex decision contexts with high potential for trade-offs. Improving social equity is one such objective that is often considered an enabler of successful outcomes and a virtuous ideal in itself. Despite its idealized importance in conservation policy, social equity is often highly simplified or ill-defined and is applied uncritically. What constitutes equitable outcomes and processes is highly normative and subject to ethical deliberation. Different ethical frameworks may lead to different conceptions of equity through alternative perspectives of what is good or right. This can lead to different and potentially conflicting equity objectives in practice. We promote a more transparent, nuanced, and pluralistic conceptualization of equity in conservation decision making that particularly recognizes where multidimensional equity objectives may conflict. To help identify and mitigate ethical conflicts and avoid cases of good intentions producing bad outcomes, we encourage a more analytical incorporation of equity into conservation decision making particularly during mechanistic integration of equity objectives. We recommend that in conservation planning motivations and objectives for equity be made explicit within the problem context, methods used to incorporate equity objectives be applied with respect to stated objectives, and, should objectives dictate, evaluation of equity outcomes and adaptation of strategies be employed during policy implementation.

Ocean zoning within a sparing versus sharing framework

The land-sparing versus land-sharing debate centers around how different intensities of habitat use can be coordinated to satisfy competing demands for biodiversity persistence and food production in agricultural landscapes. We apply the broad concepts from this debate to the sea and propose it as a framework to inform marine zoning based on three possible management strategies, establishing: no-take marine reserves, regulated fishing zones, and unregulated open-access areas. We develop a general model that maximizes standing fish biomass, given a fixed management budget while maintaining a minimum harvest level. We find that when management budgets are small, sea-sparing is the optimal management strategy because for all parameters tested, reserves are more cost-effective at increasing standing biomass than traditional fisheries management. For larger budgets, the optimal strategy switches to sea-sharing because, at a certain point, further investing to grow the no-take marine reserves reduces catch below the minimum harvest constraint. Our intention is to illustrate how general rules of thumb derived from plausible, single-purpose models can help guide marine protected area policy under our novel sparing and sharing framework. This work is the beginning of a basic theory for optimal zoning allocations and should be considered complementary to the more specific spatial planning literature for marine reserve as nations expand their marine protected area estates.