{"title":"Should the biodiversity bank be a savings bank or a lending bank?","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.ecocom.2024.101101","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Conservation offsets are increasingly used as an instrument for biodiversity conservation on private lands. Since the restoration of degraded land often involves uncertainties and time lags, conservation biologists have recommended that credits in conservation offset schemes be awarded only with the completion of the restoration process (“savings bank”). These arguments, however, ignore that such a scheme design may incur higher economic costs than a design in which credits are already awarded at the initiation of the restoration process (“lending bank”). Here a generic agent-based ecological-economic simulation model is developed to explore the cost-effectiveness of savings and lending banks. The economic model compartment considers spatially heterogeneous and dynamic conservation costs and time preferences in the landowners. The ecological compartment considers uncertainty in the duration and the success of restoration process, and in the metapopulation dynamics of a species described by the rates of local population extinction and the colonisation of empty habitat patches. By this the widely used offset metric of “habitat hectares” is replaced by “metapopulation viability” which is commonly used in conservation biology. It turns out that whether credits should be awarded at the initiation or with completion of restoration depends on the ecological and economic circumstances. Larger colonisation and extinction rates, e.g., tend to favour the awarding of credits with the initiation of habitat restoration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":50559,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Complexity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ecological Complexity","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1476945X24000291","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Conservation offsets are increasingly used as an instrument for biodiversity conservation on private lands. Since the restoration of degraded land often involves uncertainties and time lags, conservation biologists have recommended that credits in conservation offset schemes be awarded only with the completion of the restoration process (“savings bank”). These arguments, however, ignore that such a scheme design may incur higher economic costs than a design in which credits are already awarded at the initiation of the restoration process (“lending bank”). Here a generic agent-based ecological-economic simulation model is developed to explore the cost-effectiveness of savings and lending banks. The economic model compartment considers spatially heterogeneous and dynamic conservation costs and time preferences in the landowners. The ecological compartment considers uncertainty in the duration and the success of restoration process, and in the metapopulation dynamics of a species described by the rates of local population extinction and the colonisation of empty habitat patches. By this the widely used offset metric of “habitat hectares” is replaced by “metapopulation viability” which is commonly used in conservation biology. It turns out that whether credits should be awarded at the initiation or with completion of restoration depends on the ecological and economic circumstances. Larger colonisation and extinction rates, e.g., tend to favour the awarding of credits with the initiation of habitat restoration.
期刊介绍:
Ecological Complexity is an international journal devoted to the publication of high quality, peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of biocomplexity in the environment, theoretical ecology, and special issues on topics of current interest. The scope of the journal is wide and interdisciplinary with an integrated and quantitative approach. The journal particularly encourages submission of papers that integrate natural and social processes at appropriately broad spatio-temporal scales.
Ecological Complexity will publish research into the following areas:
• All aspects of biocomplexity in the environment and theoretical ecology
• Ecosystems and biospheres as complex adaptive systems
• Self-organization of spatially extended ecosystems
• Emergent properties and structures of complex ecosystems
• Ecological pattern formation in space and time
• The role of biophysical constraints and evolutionary attractors on species assemblages
• Ecological scaling (scale invariance, scale covariance and across scale dynamics), allometry, and hierarchy theory
• Ecological topology and networks
• Studies towards an ecology of complex systems
• Complex systems approaches for the study of dynamic human-environment interactions
• Using knowledge of nonlinear phenomena to better guide policy development for adaptation strategies and mitigation to environmental change
• New tools and methods for studying ecological complexity