When uncertainty prevails, conservation decision makers allocate funds, inputs and resources between different possible future states of nature. Decision makers explicitly or implicitly substitute biodiversity in one future state of nature for biodiversity in another. However, the decision making frameworks common in conservation biology do not model such behaviour. Frameworks such as information gap analysis, expected utility, stochastic dominance and minmax loss result in funds or resources being dedicated to one state of nature. Moreover, conservation prioritisation methods based on the probability of success assume that only one state of nature is possible and implicitly allocate funds to one state. Building off a previously-published model of state-contingent prioritisation, and utilising a standard hypothetical example of maximising the population size of orange-bellied parrots (Neophema chrysogaster), we contrast the state-contingent approach with standard decision making frameworks in conservation biology.
Results/Conclusions
Applying our state-contingent model and other decision-making frameworks to the orange-bellied parrot example, we explain that the state-contingent approach is unique in allocating funds across different states of nature. All other methods concentrate funds in any one state. For example, the information-gap and minmax loss frameworks lead to resources being dedicated to one conservation action. The expected utility framework leads to resources being dedicated to another conservation action. In contrast, under the state-contingent approach resources are allocated to all conservation actions. The extent to which any one action or future state of nature receives funding depends on three variables – the subjective probability that the state of nature will arise, society’s risk preferences, and the ‘conservation technology’ or the effectiveness of the conservation action under the future state of nature. We focus on the conservation technology and introduce three different classes – state general technologies, state allocable technologies and state specific technologies. Each type of conservation technology leads to different allocation solutions and we provide examples from the conservation literature where each technology applies. The state-contingent approach to conservation is also a natural fit for applying the precautionary principle because it leads to a pre-emptive allocation to bad states of nature.