With this in mind, a team from Stanford University, US, and US conservation organization The Nature Conservancy has found that ecosystem service projects attract on average more than four times as much funding as biodiversity projects, through increased corporate sponsorship and their use of a wider variety of finance tools. The researchers found that ecosystem projects expanded opportunities for conservation – they did not draw down limited financial resources for conservation but instead engaged more diverse funders.
"Traditionally conservation approaches focused on biodiversity-only goals: conserving special places and animals without including people," Rebecca Goldman of The Nature Conservancy told environmentalresearchweb. "In the United States, this approach gave rise to our National Parks which people can access, but such parks are still ultimately a protection strategy rather than an integration strategy."
According to Goldman, ecosystem services offer the potential to integrate humans and conservation. "They could link the preservation, restoration, and enhancement of natural resources to advancement of human welfare and human well-being," she said. "Doing this could be a potentially huge advance for conservation in the face of a growing human population."
Of the 34 ecosystem service and 26 traditional biodiversity projects in the Western Hemisphere the researchers examined, the ecosystem service projects were more likely to encompass working landscapes and the people in them. What’s more, the projects were no less likely than biodiversity schemes to include or create protected areas.
"My research demonstrates that ecosystem service projects do offer opportunities to expand conservation into landscapes that are used by people, particularly working agricultural landscapes," said Goldman. "These projects find creative ways to engage landowners and land users in conservation through implementing best management practices. As human influence grows, engaging people in conservation and diversifying and enhancing revenue streams becomes critical to conservation success."
According to the researchers, crop and pastureland are rapidly dominating Earth’s terrestrial surfaces: 40% of global land area is in pasture or cropland. "Thus taking ecosystem service conservation to scale can have global implications for the conservation of Earth’s natural resources by making conservation economically attractive and commonplace," said Goldman.
Goldman is intrigued by the importance of ecosystem services as a market strategy, a conservation tool and a new approach. "My approach was qualitative involving interviews to get data from the people who know the projects best, but I generated largely quantitative results," she said. "The extensive database I collected, which included more than 500 attributes, is the most complete database on these conservation projects that exists. These two projects types – ecosystem services versus biodiversity – have never been compared analytically across so many different attributes."
Almost all conservation projects lack thorough, full-scale outcome-based monitoring, says the team, which can be time-consuming and costly. "However, The Nature Conservancy is rapidly developing efficient methods to measure the effectiveness of project investments," said Goldman. "I am most interested in thinking about the social components of these measures and hope to research how to develop measures of social returns from conservation land uses."
The researchers reported their work in PNAS.