The role of trade-offs in biodiversity conservation planning: linking local management, regional planning and global conservation efforts

摘要

Biodiversity conservation planning requires trade-offs, given the realities of limited resources and the competing demands of society. If net benefits for society are important, biodiversity assessment cannot occur without other sectoral factors ``on the tablea€?. In trade-offs approaches, the biodiversity value of a given area is expressed in terms of the species or other components of biodiversity that it has that are additional to the components protected elsewhere. That ``marginal gaina€? is called the complementarity value of the area. A recent whole-country planning study for Papua New Guinea illustrates the importance of complementarity-based trade-offs in determining priority areas for biodiversity conservation, and for designing economic instruments such as biodiversity levies and offsets. Two international biodiversity programs provide important new opportunities for biodiversity trade-offs taking complementarity into account. Both the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Critical Ecosystems or ``hotspotsa€? programs can benefit from an explicit framework that incorporates trade-offs, in which a balance is achieved not only by land-use allocation among areas, but also by the crediting of partial protection of biodiversity provided by sympathetic management within areas. For both international programs, our trade-offs framework can provide a natural linkage between local, regional and global planning levels.