杏吧原创

IMAGINE you have $10 million to spend and you want to do something really useful with it. There could be few better causes than saving the planet. And with conservation schemes so pitifully underfunded, your money is sure to be welcomed with open arms. OK, so $10 million isn鈥檛 going to change the world overnight, but if you want to make any sort of difference you鈥檒l need to know how to squeeze the maximum value from your greenbacks. Here鈥檚 where your problems begin.

Conservation organisations often work on the principle that if you give a man a fish he鈥檚 set up for supper, but teach him to catch his own and he鈥檚 set up for life. This indirect approach to conserving species seems like common sense. The idea is to promote alternative, sustainable ways of exploiting resources for profit. This helps the local community and takes the pressure off the species you want to conserve. But in practice it鈥檚 not so straightforward, because the link between education and conservation is often tenuous. And if a cash incentive is involved, there鈥檚 no guarantee that people won鈥檛 take the extra money and continue to cut the forest or hunt bushmeat when the going gets tough.

So what鈥檚 the alternative? Agnes Kiss, an ecologist at the World Bank, and Paul Ferraro, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, believe you would be far better off spending your cash on payments that reward people directly for protecting biodiversity 鈥� in effect paying them to farm wildlife sustainably. They claim that the indirect approach, which they describe as 鈥渃onservation by distraction鈥�, has largely failed and that direct payments are a cheaper way of getting what you want. Not surprisingly, their analysis, published last November in Science (vol 298, p 1718) has raised a few hackles, but it is also forcing those who hold the conservation purse strings to question whether they could get better value for money.

The idea of direct payments is not entirely new. There are already several schemes where companies or public bodies that benefit from 鈥渆cosystem services鈥� provided by nature 鈥� such as the water purification performed by soil and forests 鈥� pay for its conservation (New 杏吧原创, 6 February 1999, p 42). One of the best examples is the Environmental Services Payment Programme in Costa Rica, which pays landowners to conserve forest in key watershed areas. But Kiss and Ferraro鈥檚 proposals go further. They want to assign a value to biodiversity itself, regardless of how useful it is to us 鈥� in the same way that, for the public good, the Greek government pays to conserve the Acropolis or a museum pays for the restoration of a painting by Van Gogh.

To illustrate the superiority of such an approach, they point to the Netherlands. In an effort to conserve threatened farmland birds such as lapwings and black-tailed godwits, since 1980 some Dutch farmers have received compensation for adopting less intensive practices. But the scheme has proved difficult to monitor and enforce. Also, it tends to drive a wedge between farmers and conservationists, because it promotes the idea that profitable farming and saving birds are incompatible objectives. But an innovative scheme set up in 1993 to reward farmers for producing concrete results in conservation terms 鈥� namely the number of clutches reared on their land 鈥� has proved much more successful.

The scheme costs $40 per clutch compared with a cost of between $100 and $400 per clutch for the old approach. It has also fostered a totally different mindset among farmers 鈥� the birds are seen as another valuable product of their farms, so they have an incentive to come up with innovative ways to help them breed. What鈥檚 more, in the initial trial of the approach from 1993 to 1996, birds on land being managed under the new scheme were around 20 per cent more successful at hatching chicks than those on control farms (Biological Conservation, vol 15, p 363).

A similarly direct approach is achieving results on the outskirts of Nairobi National Park in Kenya. It aims to protect migration corridors for big game such as wildebeest and zebra. The route out of the park was shrinking as Masai landowners began to fence off and farm the land. Now the African Wildlife Foundation and Friends of Nairobi National Park, both based in Nairobi, are issuing 鈥淲ildlife Conservation Leases鈥� to landowners who agree not to fence off or farm some of their land in return for a payment of $4 per acre per year. These payments, which amount to between $400 and $800 for a typical farmer, can represent half the family鈥檚 income and are more reliable than the income from crops.

Kiss and Ferraro argue that such projects are simpler to implement and less haphazard than the indirect approach to conservation that is popular at the moment. But the bottom line, they argue, is that direct payments are a cheaper way to get what you want. Their comments have struck a chord with some in the business. 鈥淭he problem in the past has been that we鈥檝e given people jobs and suddenly expected them to become conservationists,鈥� says Russ Mittermeier, head of Conservation International, which is based in Washington DC.

Many, however, are deeply suspicious of a market-oriented approach. 鈥淐onserving biodiversity is based on a moral obligation to allow other species on the planet to survive,鈥� says Jon Lovett, a conservation biologist at the University of York. 鈥淚f you pollute that ideology, it becomes very easy to go up the wrong path.鈥� Making such a pact with the devil, he argues, is playing into the hands of the very short-termism that threatens biodiversity. Today, the local community may preserve the forest in return for a financial sweetener, but if the price isn鈥檛 right tomorrow they will be just as likely to exploit it for a quick buck. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a bit like prostitution,鈥� says Lovett, 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got it, you sell it, but you鈥檝e still got it.鈥� And you are always open to blackmail if the farmers demand more money, he adds. Ferraro acknowledges that this is a danger, but he believes that it is unlikely to materialise because competition for conservation payments will keep prices down. If one farmer doubles his asking price you can usually offer the contract to someone else.

More fundamentally, Lovett warns that he believes direct payments breed what he calls a 鈥渃ulture of dependency鈥� among the recipients, reinforcing the divide between rich and poor nations. But Ferraro insists that recipients are only dependent in the same way that your local baker is dependent on you buying her bread. 鈥淚t is not a welfare payment, but a payment for services rendered,鈥� he says. If rich nations believe in the moral rights of nature to exist then they have an obligation to pay for it.

But how far can the money go? Continuously shelling out to save the same piece of land is hardly a sustainable solution. 鈥淲hen the money dries up it is back to square one again,鈥� says Peter Rains, managing director of Coral Cay Conservation, based in London. Kiss and Ferraro counter that it is impossible to escape the fact that conservation is expensive. Even indirect conservation programmes need continuous cash injections to keep them afloat. Very few protected areas are able to fund themselves through the sustainable harvesting of products such as nuts or honey alone. And the ecotourist dollar is notoriously fickle. All it takes is a terrorist attack such as the Bali bomb 鈥� or even just the threat of one 鈥� to send the visitors elsewhere.

So is treating biodiversity as a market commodity the answer to saving the planet? Some say that the argument over direct versus indirect is just the latest example of a dangerous faddism that pervades conservation. At its root, the problem is that conservation is incredibly difficult to do. And much as ecologists aspire to deliver precise scientific judgements on how to preserve biodiversity, the reality is more messy. 鈥淐onservation is as much an art as it is a science,鈥� says Jeffrey McNeely, chief scientist at the IUCN (the World Conservation Union) in Geneva. 鈥淵ou have to take some things on faith.

Success is as much about politics and economics as it is about genetics and viable population sizes, for example. But there is a growing realisation that conservationists need to do more to establish what works best under which conditions. 鈥淎t the moment, discussing what works is largely a matter of rhetoric rather than science,鈥� says Andrew Balmford from Cambridge University.

Over the past two decades, much research effort has been expended on determining where conservation should be targeted. Norman Myers of Oxford University championed this approach, identifying 25 global 鈥渉ot spots鈥� of biodiversity (New 杏吧原创, 26 February 2000, p 12). These are regions such as Indonesia, the Amazon and Madagascar that contain an exceptional number of 鈥渆ndemic鈥� species 鈥� those that are found there and nowhere else. He calculated that the total area, which is smaller than Greenland, contains nearly half of all plant species and a third of land vertebrates.

But at heart, the issue of where to spend conservation money isn鈥檛 a scientific question at all. Clearly we need to know where the species are that are endangered, but who鈥檚 to say whether an endemic species is more deserving of being saved than a rare but widespread species inhabiting a wilderness region? One does not have more inherent value than the other. What鈥檚 more, many biological hot spots have already been considerably damaged by human activities. Perhaps we would do better spending our money on less biologically diverse but largely untouched wilderness regions such as Patagonia, Siberia, Namibia and the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

This approach has something else in its favour. To add more rigour to decisions about where to spend conservation dollars, Balmford and his colleagues looked at which parts of the planet offer best value for money. Their study, published in January in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 100, p 1046) shows that costs vary around the world from 10 cents per year to save a square kilometre in the Russian Arctic, to over a million dollars for the same area in Germany. The main reason is that everyday costs are much lower in less developed countries. More surprisingly, the analysis also suggests that there should be more investment in wilderness areas, which although they contain fewer endemic species than the hot spots, are cheaper to work in because they are far from large population centres (New 杏吧原创, 25 January 2003, p 5).

But value for money isn鈥檛 the only consideration. The practical details governing your chances of success should also be a factor when choosing where to spend funds. West Africa, for example, is a biodiversity hot spot, but it has hosted a string of failed conservation efforts that were scuppered by corruption and civil war. 鈥淭he conservation organisations have all been burned there,鈥� says John Terborgh at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Frustrating though it might be, he sees conservation efforts in the region as a waste of money until the political climate settles down.

While such nebulous issues are important, the question of how to achieve results is vital if conservation efforts are to be put on a more scientific footing. Here, advocating a single policy is probably simplistic. 鈥淐onservation and environmentalism have suffered from the silver bullet complex,鈥� says Thomas Lovejoy, head of the Heinz Center in Washington DC, which recently completed a comprehensive report on the health of the environment in the US. He believes conservationists are sometimes seduced by the latest buzzword, to the exclusion of more established methods. And if the current fad doesn鈥檛 deliver, it is in danger of being dropped before anyone has had a chance to work out why.

鈥淭here is no single perfect answer,鈥� says John Lawton, head of the Natural Environment Research Council in Swindon, Wiltshire, which allocates research funds from the British government. He thinks the direct approach has advantages, but it won鈥檛 work everywhere. Conservation must go hand in hand with development in order to ease pressure on threatened ecosystems, he says, or else 鈥渄esperate people will do desperate things鈥�.

He points to successful community-based projects such as CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe. These projects 鈥� set up in 1989 鈥� are primarily aimed at empowering communities to use their local resources sustainably. But this indirect approach has had important conservation benefits as well. For example, trophy hunters will pay upwards of $40,000 to shoot lion or buffalo. That sort of money is a big incentive for the community to protect the animals from poachers and maintain their habitat.

Nick Salafsky, co-director of Foundations for Success in Bethesda, is another who thinks that conservationists need to take a more sophisticated line. 鈥淚f all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail,鈥� he says. His organisation aims to establish which methods work best in which situations.

鈥淭he major conservation organisations are very poor at self-analysis and learning lessons from projects that haven鈥檛 worked,鈥� says Terborgh. Part of the problem is that there is no tradition of independent monitoring in the conservation community. Each organisation tends to give itself a glowing annual report by cherry-picking results from its most successful projects. All this backslapping is beginning to sound hollow in the face of a clearly worsening global picture, says M. A. Sanjayan, lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia. 鈥淔ailure is not inherently wrong,鈥� he adds, 鈥渟o long as you learn from it.鈥� He believes that this fear of bad news is stifling risk-taking and innovation.

Sanjayan and others argue that conservation charities need to set up a structure for independently auditing projects. This will mean establishing an 鈥渋ndustry standard鈥� of agreed, robust and relatively simple criteria for success. Balmford admits that it will be hard to persuade charities to accept what amounts to conservation peer review, because 鈥渘o one likes competitors seeing your dirty laundry鈥�. But he argues that it will have profound benefits for everyone by identifying best practice. And there should be another advantage. A more professional approach, he says, will entitle conservation to a larger slice of the funding pie.