Private Ownership of Wildlife can help the cause of conservation

[Barun]

Market-Based Incentives and Private Ownership of Wildlife to Remedy Shortfalls in Government Funding for Conservation

Authors: George R. Wilson, Matt W. Hayward, Charlie Wilson, 

Conservation Letters, 13 October 2016 

Abstract

In some parts of the world, proprietorship, price incentives, and devolved responsibility for management, accompanied by effective regulation, have increased wildlife and protected habitats, particularly for iconic and valuable species. Elsewhere, market incentives are constrained by policies and laws, and in some places virtually prohibited. In Australia and New Zealand, micro economic reform has enhanced innovation and improved outcomes in many areas of the economy, but economic liberalism and competition are rarely applied to the management of wildlife. This policy perspective examines if commercial value and markets could attract private sector investment to compensate for Government underspend on biodiversity conservation. It proposes trials in which landholders, community groups, and investors would have a form of wildlife ownership by leasing animals on land outside protected areas. They would be able to acquire threatened species from locally overabundant populations, breed them, innovate, and assist further colonization/range expansion while making a profit from the increase. The role of government would be to regulate, as is appropriate in a mixed economy, rather than be the (sole) owner and manager of wildlife. Wide application of the trials would not answer all biodiversity-loss problems, but it could assist in the restoration of degraded habitat and connectivity.

Introduction

The newly defined Anthropocene reflects the global damage that humanity is causing such damage to the Earth and its biodiversity that a new epoch has been defined – the Anthropocene. (Steffen et al. 2011). Globally, rates of extinction are 100–1,000 times those considered natural (De Vos et al. 2015). In Australia, where close to half of the world's mammal extinctions in the last 200 years have occurred (Johnson 2006), the net rate is increasing (Hoffmann et al. 2011), their status is worsening (Woinarski et al. 2014), and conservation beyond protected areas and national reserves is particularly important (Hayward 2011). While species should be conserved due to their inherent right to exist (Miller et al. 2014) and because they have a utility for the ecosystems they sustain, there appears to be insufficient global human support of this view. New models are urgently required to reverse extinction trends (Kareiva et al. 2012). Less costly, or cost neutral (or perhaps even profitable) institutional arrangements are needed to encourage individuals and businesses to invest in the conservation of wildlife. Borrowing concepts and tools from other fields broadens our range of options to address the “wicked” complexity of conservation problems (Game et al. 2014) and economic valuation and role of markets should be one of them (Scharks & Masuda 2016).

Enabling private sector and personal benefit where wildlife ownership and management were previously vested exclusively in the governments can lead to innovation, competition, and positive outcomes in species and habitat conservation (Child et al. 2012; Lindsey et al. 2013). It can also be beneficial where poaching controls are a priority (Challender & MacMillan 2014) and it can supplement regulation and education where animals and plants are being farmed to meet a market (Phelps et al. 2014). The process is encapsulated by the “subsidiarity1 proprietorship, and price principle: if wildlife rights and management are devolved to the lowest level and if the value is captured by the landholder, and (the individual), the probability of successful wildlife and natural resource conservation is greatly increased” (Child et al. 2012). Further support for the principle comes from reviews elsewhere in Africa, India, and North America that concluded that providing communities with ownership of land, user-rights over wildlife, and capacity to attract long-term private/donor investment enabled wildlife to fare better, improved poaching control, and increased the effectiveness of protected areas (Pack et al. 2013; Lindsey et al. 2014). This policy perspective proposes changes to proprietorship and the application of market-based incentives to remedy shortfalls in funding to conserve Australia and New Zealand's wildlife. Trials of the concept could be relevant to wildlife conservation globally.

The concept and its scope

Much of the damage to biodiversity in Australia and New Zealand has occurred on private lands due to conversion of natural vegetation to agriculture, forestry and urban areas, and to the effects of invasive species on the function of ecosystems (Lindenmayer 2007). Commercial incentives could encourage landholders to reverse these trends and so complement regulation. Sanctuaries operated without such incentives by philanthropic organizations in Australia and New Zealand have made a significant contribution to threatened species conservation through assisted recolonization in recent years (Innes et al. 2015). Our proposal seeks to broaden the freedom they have to dispose of surplus stock and to enhance competition with them. They already have a form of proprietorship over wildlife and have been frequently identified as superior to Government agencies in contributing to biodiversity and wildlife conservation targets including by the Parliament of Australia (2013). Private landholders and other community groups should be permitted to add to that success. The proposed scope is Australian and New Zealand threatened mammals and birds that are currently not the subject of trade either dead or alive. Their progeny would be extractively used (Hutton & Leader-Williams 2003) meaning that they would be removed from founder populations as part of a conservation strategy to expand populations. When released to establish new colonies, they would be helping restore land to uses that are currently less compatible with biodiversity conservation.

Most landholders who allocate resources to wildlife conservation currently do so for altruistic and aesthetic reasons. Our proposal is that they would allocate more resources if they also had proprietorship of wildlife and a profit incentive. The incentive might come through the sale of live animals for further translocation, through display of animals in wildlife tourism, or even through use of more common species such as kangaroos and emus, parrots and reptiles, although these opportunities are not the primary focus of this article. We propose that landholders who wish to do so, should be able to express a demand for animals, breed them, and so help conserve wildlife off-reserves.

Importance of property rights 

Well-defined, secure, and transferable property rights help to establish and capture the value of resources thereby providing an incentive for owners to efficiently use and maintain them (Demsetz 1967). Property rights encourage owners to consider long-term implications of their activities, and so increase the likelihood of sustainable management (Cooney et al. 2015). Without property rights, wildlife users, including harvesters, have little motivation to take into account the cost of their actions on future availability, typically resulting in overuse. Notwithstanding the general wisdom of these observations, wildlife property rights vary around the world from state-owned (e.g., Australia) to landowner-based private (e.g., South Africa). Indigenous ownership responsibility and rights to access wildlife also vary along this spectrum.

The “no-private property rights policy” follows the directives that came out of the 1933 London Convention2, that wildlife should be conserved through a combination of “pristine” parks, and nonuse of nationalized wildlife on land outside them. Under this model, the Australian and New Zealand Governments maintain a hegemony over the management of wildlife; notwithstanding that their dominance has not shortened threatened species nor integrated management of more common species with agricultural production. On the other hand, the allocation of property rights policy is consistent with the findings of the 1961 Arusha Conference (IUCN 1963) which concluded that:

“only by the planned utilization of wildlife as a renewable natural resource, either for protein or as a recreational attraction, can wildlife conservation and development be economically justified in competition with agriculture, stock ranching and other forms of land use.” p. 19

The complete paper is available here.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12313/full