Money for Nothing? A Call for Empirical Evaluation of Biodiversity Conservation Investments

For far too long, conservation scientists and practitioners
have depended on intuition and anecdote to guide the design of conservation investments. If we want to ensure that our limited resources make a difference, we must accept that testing hypotheses about what policies protect biological diversity requires the same scientific rigor and state-of-the-art methods that we invest in testing ecological hypotheses. Our understanding of the ecological aspects of ecosystem conservation rests, in part, on well-designed empirical studies. In contrast, our understanding of the way in which policies can prevent species loss and ecosystem degradation rests primarily on case-study narratives from field initiatives that are not designed to answer the question “Does the intervention work better than no intervention at all?”

When it comes to evaluating the success of its interventions, the field of ecosystem protection and biodiversity conservation lags behind most other policy fields (e.g., poverty reduction, riminal rehabilitation, disease control; see Box 1). The immature state of conservation policy research is most clearly observed in the recent publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. While the biological chapters are rife with data and empirical studies, the Policy Responses volume [1] lists as one of its “Main Messages” the following: “Few well-designed empirical analyses assess even the most common biodiversity conservation measures.” If any progress is to be made in stemming the global decline of biodiversity, the field of conservation policy must adopt state-of-the-art program evaluation methods to determine what works and when. We are not advocating that every conservation intervention be evaluated with the methods we describe below.

We are merely advocating that some of the hundreds of biodiversity conservation initiatives initiated each year are evaluated with these methods. While there are challenges to field implementation of the methods, their use is no more expensive or complicated than biological assessments. Their promise lies in complementing case study narratives and testing intuition.