Prioritising conservation objectives

An article in press in a recent issue of TREE proposed that triage approach should be explicitly employed in decision-making about the allocation of limited resources in conservation efforts.

Prioritising conservation objectives, in my opinion, is really not new.  All decision makers have to balance limited funding and other resources among a few (sometimes contradicting) conservation goals.  However, the author of the article argues, triage has been regarded as defeatism thinking and may lead to abandoning conservation efforts that is meaningful and has a high probability of success.  Due to the unpopular image of triage, decision makers often have to avoid mentioning triage in conservation planning explicitly.  Doing so leads to irrational policies and decisions hijacked by evaluations other than those that based on ecological and economical principles.

The author proposes that the triage process should be mentioned explicitly in planning and follow certain rules in consideration so as to achieve rational triage and optimised outcome.  The four principles should be considered are: values, biodiversity benefit, probability of success, and cost.  The latter two are not difficult to understand.  However the evaluation of values and biodiversity benefit may involve some complexities and very lively debate.

The objective function that the author proposed is the product of the first three factors divided by cost.  The resources are allocated to project that yields highest outcome in this equation.  Such an approach is straightforward.  Nevertheless, the questions that how to estimate the value of a particular species or ecosystem and how they affect local and global biodiversity have no definitive answers.  Theories such as the driver-passenger analogy may help but cannot address all the complexities in ecosystems.  Species-by-species conservation may overlook species and ecological functions that deemed not important or economically worthy of conserving.  Even the loss of a few seeming unimportant species with overlapping ecological functions in the long run may cause sudden collapse of the system by decreasing system resilience.

Thus it is necessary to examine the value of species and their biodiversity benefits from multiple perspectives.  The real benefit of making triage decision-making explicit, in my opinion, is to allow multiple stakeholder groups as well as researchers with different conservation goals to evaluate the conservation options and achieve more informed decisions.  The positive role triage approach plays therefore depends on how open and constructive the decision-making process is.