Costs of Protected Areas in the United States

Protected areas, or land owned in fee by agencies and non-profits to further conservation goals, have traditionally been the go-to choice for conservation interests. The UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre estimates that, currently, close to 15% of all terrestrial and inland water areas are protected. This figure falls short of the Aichi Biodiversity Target of 17% in 2020, that was added to the Convention on Biological Diversity by its 196 signatories in 2010. But as the Convention prepares to set new post-2020 targets, this percentage is expected to keep increasing. Although acquiring a parcel of land is only one of the many strategies available to conservation planners, it has the strong advantage to provide the owner with the highest right of control over the use of the property, allowing conservation organizations to address threats from habitat destruction and pursue active management to advance biodiversity goals.

This does not come without a price and conservation organizations incur a wide variety of costs when acquiring and subsequently managing such areas. A common distinction is made between up-front, one-time costs involved in acquiring land (acquisition costs), and recurrent costs of managing a conservation program on a given area, over time (management costs). Acquisition and management costs of protected areas are the focus of this dissertation; however, we will often refer to and discuss other type of costs.

Optimal decision making and resource allocation tools have been developed to help conservation organizations manage limited budgets available to support protected areas and other programs. Provided with spatially explicit estimates of both conservation costs and ecological benefits, these tools can help decision makers identify areas offering the best return on investment (ROI). Studies have revealed that this type of approach could lead to large efficiency savings. However, limited data regarding actual conservation costs has meant that most of those studies have relied on readily available proxies instead of actual cost data. For example, gross revenue or economic rent from agricultural lands is often used in lieu of acquisition costs. The potential problem with this approach is that the dynamics of conservation land transactions could be very different from those of agricultural lands, and there is a risk that such estimates do not preserve the spatial pattern of variation in actual protected area acquisition costs. Efforts to study management costs also have suffered from the lack of available data, and many resort to taking a "snapshot" estimation approach, focusing only on what has been spent or what would ideally need to be spent to achieve particular goals, in a single year ignoring temporal variability in protected area management costs.

Relying on poor cost estimates will make conservation planning recommendations less effective. I will describe actual management and acquisition costs of U.S. protected areas and then show how better cost accounting changes the outcomes of optimization analyses.