Q&A: A little flexibility can stretch conservation dollars

Getting funding can be one of the hardest parts of conserving wildlife, and often, those funds come with stipulations about where conservation work can take place. But sometimes the needs are even greater just over the state line or in the next watershed.

In a paper published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers looked at how a little more flexibility could make public and private conservation dollars go farther. We caught up with lead author Paul Armsworth, a professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, to talk about the findings. His responses are edited for brevity and style.

What motivated you to look at how to use funds for wildlife conservation in a better way?

One of the big challenges we face in conservation is that the places with the most resources to support conservation are not the same places where conservation action would have the greatest impact.

That’s true regardless of what objectives you choose. Is it about protecting all species? Vulnerable species? Ecosystem services? It doesn’t actually matter. As you look across different objectives, the highest impact opportunities are not the places where we have the most resources. That can be public resources or private resources.

That challenge, I think, epitomizes lots of aspects of conservation within individual states here in the U.S., but also globally.

Where is the disconnect in places chosen for conservation funding and where conservation should take place?

We have a situation whereby donors—or, on the public funding side, politicians—are looking after their constituencies. They’re looking for conservation in their backyard. They want nearby projects that they can connect to their local public.

But if the resources are concentrated in some parts of the map, that would lead to natural resource conservation or management actions being concentrated in places that aren’t necessarily the best opportunities we could have. So we could be stuck there.

Or we can listen to some of the voices that conservation science has had for decades. That sort of clamor of “you should trust me and my algorithm, and I will tell you the best place to conserve.” That’s a useful contribution, but it hasn’t moved people.

We’ve been stuck at those two poles. It’s either conservation being concentrated in the place with the resources or scientists saying, “but over here is a really good opportunity.” We want to find a way to move this discussion forward. The way to do it is not just to say, “What could we do if we had perfect flexibility?” Instead, the way to do it is to think about where people are today—to respect their autonomy as decision makers, to respect the private donors and what they’re excited by, to respect the politicians and their catering to multiple needs. Find them where they are and try and come up with a way to put data into their hands that would show what could be done with funding if you allow a little bit more flexibility.

What are some examples where funding is too rigid?

You can see it in federal-to-state granting policies that have formulas for how funding should be allocated across states. For example, the Land and Water Conservation Fund provided funding on an equal basis across states and other funding based on a state’s population relative to the U.S. population, with a restriction that no one gets more than 10% of the funding. That leads to a very distributed pattern of funding allocations.

If we’re looking at biodiversity, it’s not as distributed as that. There are some places in the country where we can have a higher impact than others due to the distribution of species—particularly vulnerable species. It also has to do with how much it costs to secure land protection in different places.

Can you explain your grocery store analogy?

You’re going to the grocery store and you’ve got $150 to spend. You’re told to do the best you can for your family. You would go and pick some items that you and your family love or would work for you. Now imagine if I said, “You need to spend $10 in every single aisle.” You might not have pets, or you might not have young kids, but you’re going to have to spend some money in the pet section and the baby section. It doesn’t make sense. And that’s how some of these restrictions limit conservation actions. Actions will be much more effective at delivering on a conservation program’s goals if they can be targeted towards places where they will do most good for biodiversity or benefits to people from nature.

What might better flexibility look like?

It’s not total flexibility. It’s a little bit of flexibility, looking at projects not right in your backyard but in your neighborhood, or in the watershed you share with a neighbor. Here in East Tennessee, if I reached across the border to North Carolina or Virginia, how would that change the impact that I could have? It’s not just immediate geography either. Migratory species provide another shared ecological focus that people can be asked to come together to support.Our approach and our tools were designed to enable those comparisons to be made by the people who are providing resources and making these decisions.

What are some ways you influence a private donor’s decision to make a bigger impact?

Donors have very different motivations. Some really would only be motivated by projects that directly impact their community, and that’s absolutely fine. Our tools probably wouldn’t help them. But other donors want to see some analysis of what they could achieve right in their backyard versus what they could achieve 50 or 100 or 200 miles away. We’ve tried to think about what those individuals might want, and we developed some tools and approaches that might help build out those comparisons.

We provide an example of what a philanthropy officer at an NGO might want to take to talk to a donor. In our example, a donor in eastern Colorado is interested in conserving vulnerable biodiversity but also benefiting people. So we talked about some benefits to people. We then went through and quantified what they would get if they kept the money in eastern Colorado versus if they let it move across to shortgrass or tall grass prairie habitats shared with neighboring states.

How can we move the needle in making public funding less restrictive?

Some of these programs have two pieces. They have a fixed formula, but they then have another piece that’s often a competitive formula with a bit more flexibility built in. It’s not that public policies are not movable. It’s that you need to think about which aspects of policy you can have traction over. It’s that spirit of meeting people where they are and then moving the margin a little bit.