The Conservation Intervention Cost Data Portal is a tool that provides resources to help scientists and practitioners identify and report on conservation intervention cost data and enable cost-effective conservation practice.

Why track and report the cost of conservation interventions?

Understanding the economic costs of conservation is necessary for conservation decision support and to achieve the greatest conservation outcomes in a funding limited world. However, considering how to collect data to estimate these costs is often an afterthought. There has been a recent push to develop tools to improve how conservation scientists and practitioners collect and use conservation cost data to enable best-practice conservation decision support methods such as prioritization or return on investment analyses. Yet, there is much work that remains to be done in implementing these ideas in practice. This portal aims to summarize cutting-edge tools and theory related to collection and reporting on the costs of conservation interventions and to provide a centralized repository of materials that can be used to help track and report the costs of conservation interventions.

Goals of this portal

1. Provide guidance on how to track and report costs of conservation interventions.
2. Compile and summarize literature that reports on the costs of conservation interventions.
3. Summarize existing intervention cost datasets.

The Center for Biodiversity Outcomes partnered with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a tool to compare different funding allocation strategies for actions to recover endangered species. Together, they created a tool called the Endangered Species Recovery Explorer. This work was motivated, in part, by recognition from USFWS of past critiques of its recovery allocation process.

The Recovery Explorer can be used to evaluate potential consequences of alternative resource allocation strategies. For example, the tool can be used to examine how different allocation protocols, under the same budget constraints, affect the number of species recovered and the number of species for which extinction is averted (broken down by geographic region and taxa); how different funding levels affect recovery outcomes; how different values-based inputs (e.g., desires for taxonomic representation or regional parity in funding) influence optimal allocation and recovery outcomes; and the effect of uncertainty in technical inputs (e.g., extinction risk, cost) on allocation and outcomes.

The Recovery Explorer tool is designed to be exploratory, not prescriptive, allowing decision makers to examine alternative approaches to resource allocation by making the important components of the decision process transparent.

Since the tool was launched, it has received notorious media attention – including mention in Science and The Economist.

The KAP Scorecard is a tool designed to assess and improve partnerships between organizations that serve to link conservation knowledge with decision-making, and consists of a series of questions that prompt the user to reflect on their particular partnership, the structures and processes that underpin it, and the larger context. Responses to the survey are then converted to numerical scores to facilitate discussions between partners to identify and address areas of opportunity.   

The scorecard is most appropriate for assessing partnerships between a small number of organizations, typically just two. While the questions are geared to assessing more formal partnerships, newer and/or more informal partnerships can receive valuable insights especially while individuals are still in the process of figuring out future directions. The tool is most insightful if individuals from both partner organizations complete the assessment.

If you are interested in using the tool for research purposes, please reach out to Dr. Candice Carr-Kelman for more details. 

To assess your partnership:

Step 1. Fill out the Conservation KAP Scorecard form.

Step 2. Download and follow the instructions provided in the Partnership Scoring Worksheet to get an overall partnership score based on scores for each phase of the partnership (Initiation, Operation, and Delivery) and each thematic category (Organizational factors, Team factors, and Goals/Outcomes). 

In August of 2018, IUCN published a new guide titled Tools for measuring, modelling, and valuing ecosystem services: Guidance for Key Biodiversity Areas, natural World Heritage sites, and protected areas as the result of a multi-year international collaboration. The guide and decision tree tool help ecologists assess ecosystem services within important sites for biodiversity and nature conservation. The report reviews nine assessment tools and focuses on their application in key biodiversity areas, natural World Heritage sites and protected areas.

In preparation for this guide, principal investigators from CBO worked with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis – Science for Nature and People Partnership to advance important work with the governments of Myanmar and Canada.

Partners for this project included:

• Convention on Biological Diversity
• International Union for Conservation of Nature – World Commission on Protected Areas
• Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Germany)
• Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (Germany)
• National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis – Science for Nature and People Partnership