Increasing Effectiveness of Conservation Decisions: a System and its Application
Fred L. Bunnell
David F. Fraser
Andrew P. Harcombe
All jurisdictions face a problem of effectively allocating scarce resources to conservation efforts. Key steps in improving allocation of conservation resources are establishing specific goals to guide conservation efforts, ensuring that those goals address the challenges of jurisdictional rarity, and creating tools that can assign species quickly to appropriate actions and rank species or ecosystems for conservation effort. We describe goals for conservation that assist resource allocation within jurisdictions and two tools to help the process. One tool sorts species into practical groups for conservation action. It creates groups of species requiring similar actions. The other tool assigns conservation priorities. It orders species or ecosystems based on criteria governing risk, modified by feasibility, stewardship responsibility, disjunctiveness, and pattern of range collapse. Priorities can be ordered within an action group, within a goal, or as an overall rank. Results of applying the approach are illustrated using examples from British Columbia.
Valuating Mangrove Ecosystems as Coastal Protection in Post-Tsunami South Asia
Monte P. Sanford
Mangrove forests provide an important ecosystem service of safeguarding human societies from natural disasters along tropical coastal zones. With recent major coastal disasters, including the South Asian tsunami in 2004 and the observed protection buffer that mangroves have provided, valuating mangrove ecosystems for protecting coastal areas from natural disasters is a necessity for appropriate conservation planning of ecosystem services. In this article, I assess the avoidance and replacement costs of mangrove ecosystems in South Asia, in reference to the South Asian tsunami of 2004. The findings demonstrate that the coastal protection value of mangroves exceeds direct-use values of mangroves, such as forest harvesting and mariculture, by over 97%. Mangrove ecosystems are highly valuable for protection against natural coastal disasters, and their conservation and restoration are needed to maintain national and global natural capital.