Cost-effectiveness of conservation payment schemes under climate change

Climate change is expected to be one of the key threats for biodiversity conservation in this century. Conservation literature has pointed to the inadequacy of current biodiversity conservation practices relying predominantly on static approaches and showed the need to develop “climate-proof” conservation strategies. However, this debate has taken place largely in the conservation planning literature so far and ignored incentivebased conservation policy instruments such as conservation payments. Our general understanding is thus poor about how should conservation payments be designed so that they can contribute to biodiversity conservation under climate change in a cost-effective manner. In this work we develop an ecological-economic model and investigate the cost-effectiveness of various payment design options involving varying degrees of payments’ differentiation and targeting in a landscape whose dynamics is driven by climate change, while considering the impact of changes in key economic and ecological parameters. We provide the first comparative cost-effectiveness analysis of conservation payment designs in a changing climate on a conceptual level. Our results demonstrate the significant cost-effectiveness gains enabled by payments’ differentiation and targeting for biodiversity conservation under climate change. Moreover, we demonstrate the existence of connectivity/area trade-offs under climate change. The cost-effectiveness performance of targeted payments compared to untargeted differentiated payments increase with a decreasing species dispersal ability but decrease with decreasing climate stability in the landscape.