Trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and economic development in tropical forests

Biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation are two of humanity's most significant challenges. Historically these problems have been tackled in isolation, yet it is becoming increasingly clear that they are inextricably linked and need to be dealt with together. Human well-being depends not only on the provision of food and water, but also on the preservation of other ecosystem services, including the conservation of species and ecosystems and the many benefits we derive from them. Nevertheless, balancing environmental and economic goals is difficult, and win-win solutions (where economic development and biodiversity conservation can occur in the same place) are very rare. Progress towards a sustainable economy requires meeting two challenges; first that we stand up to the problem of combining development and conservation goals, and second that we maximise our efficiency in devising strategies that satisfy both goals. In areas where there is strong competition for land it is vital that we understand the social and economic cost of taking conservation action. By embracing the human dimension of land-use planning this project will help provide the piece of the jigsaw necessary to lift conservation away from being an academic exercise to address real-world issues. Arguably the greatest cost of conservation action is the cost to society when protecting wildlife means lost economic opportunities / what economists call 'opportunity costs'. Yet how incompatible are different economic land-uses with the protection of native species? How much more money could potentially be made in any given landscape? Providing answers to these questions is an urgent task in the Brazilian Amazon, where aggressive economic growth and high rates of deforestation threaten the chance of sustainable development in the remaining forest. Understanding the overlap between biodiversity and economic land value is therefore key to developing more sustainable forest management, and is the primary aim of this research. During my earlier work in the Brazilian Amazon I showed that dung beetles and birds were both excellent indicators of human disturbance in forest ecosystems. I shall combine existing data on these species with new field studies, to understand the conservation value of different agricultural (e.g. soybean, cattle pastures, perennial crops) and forestry (e.g. selective logging and plantation forestry) land-uses. Work will be conducted in five areas of the Amazon, and will help determine the importance of different ecological and social factors that may influence economic land-use choices. I will also collect information on the potential increase in profits that could be gained from each area of land if it was put to a more productive use. These potential improvements in income are the opportunity costs to society by interventions to conserve wildlife (e.g. reserves and parks) and/or inefficient land-uses. Comparing conservation value with the cost of foregoing economic opportunities (e.g. moving from shade to sun coffee plantations) will allow me to quantify the trade-offs between immediate human needs and nature conservation. A range of outcomes are possible: some forms of land-use may incur limited ecological losses but allow significant economic gains, while other forms of intensification may be less compatible with conservation goals. The results of this project will provide a very practical step in addressing the call by the international community, articulated in the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, for a unified approach to managing entire ecosystems. Specifically I will develop a tool for guiding strategic land-use planning that is able to identify both inefficiencies in current and planned land-uses, as well as methods of income generation that require minimal additional deforestation or habitat degradation.