Designing cost effective investments in biodiversity conservation - Paul Armsworth

Governments and conservation organizations invest billions of dollars each year in habitat conservation in efforts to slow ongoing losses of terrestrial biodiversity. In this talk, I will examine the three most commonly used conservation investment strategies: incentive payments to private landowners, conservation easements and full protected areas. I will present case studies from the US and the UK that examine whether existing conservation programs provide benefits for biodiversity cost effectively. By integrating biodiversity data and socioeconomic data with modeling, I will show how relatively simple changes to existing conservation programs promise large gains in biodiversity at no increase in overall cost.