Conservation agreements as a tool to generate direct incentives for biodiversity conservation

Abstract Many environmental issues can be attributed to misaligned distribution of the costs and benefits of conservation. For instance, biodiversity represents value for the global community, but biodiversity protection imposes various costs on local communities that depend on forests, marine areas, and other habitats of conservation importance in developing countries. Correcting this misalignment requires presenting these local communities with appropriate incentives. Conservation agreements—negotiated transactions in which conservation investors finance direct social benefits in return for conservation actions by communities—are one tool for doing so. This direct incentive approach departs from Integrated Conservation and Development (ICDP) approaches by explicitly linking benefits to verified conservation performance by resource owners/users, thus requiring effective performance monitoring protocols. In doing so, conservation agreements parallel the logic of easements and related mechanisms used in de...