Integrating economics and ecology to protect nature on private lands: models, methods, and mindsets

摘要

Protecting nature on private lands presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to protect both private landowner concerns and the biological needs of the environment; the opportunity is the need to better integrate the disciplines of ecology and economics. Such integration offers scientists the prospect of gaining more understanding about the complexities that arise in the protection of human-dominated environments, Integration also can help policy-makers make more informed decisions about how to manage private lands by adding insight into the efficacy and efficiency of alternative choices that try to balance private rights with the public gains. Integration occurs at several different levels, ranging from accounting for feedbacks between both economics and ecology within formal models to incorporating diverse methods of control to link the multiple objectives of various interest groups and people. In this paper, we discuss three illustrative examples of integration-models, methods, and mindsets-that show how one can combine economics and ecology to address the challenge of protecting nature on private lands. We explore how the explicit process of connecting disciplines can help create and refine economic incentive mechanisms that satisfy the goals set by biological needs, landowner choices, and political realities.