Special Issue "Economic Growth and Sustainable Wildlife Management"

Guest Editor
Dr. Jerry V. Mead
Watershed and Systems Ecology Section, Patrick Center for Environmental Research, The Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA
E-Mail:

Dear Colleagues,

Finding a balance between the economy of humans and wildlife within our ecosystems is critical for conserving fish and wildlife. The field of ecological economics is advancing rapidly, professional conservation and economic societies have and are adopting position statements on the conflict between growth and wildlife conservation, and ecologists are becoming more involved in economics. However, much work still needs to be done to understand the relation between the human economy and wildlife management. This special issue examines how economic growth influences wildlife management and bioconservation. The majority of papers in this issue will be research papers, with the exception of a few papers that examine the performance of conservation efforts from a historical context. The objective of the issue is to examine the successes and failures of economic policies, especially economic growth, that impact bioconservation.

Dr. Jerry V. Mead
Guest Editor

• gross domestic product
• ecological economics
• bioconservation
• environmental policy

Title: Innovative Financing for Biodiversity Conservation: Outcome-Based Approaches
Authors: C. Josh Donlan ^1,2 and Johannes Kiess ³
Affiliatons: ¹ Advanced Conservation Strategies, PO Box 1201, Midway UT 84049, USA; E-Mail: jdonlan@advancedconservation.org (C.J.D.)
² Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
³ The World Bank, Washington D.C. 20433, USA
Abstract: Biodiversity and the ecosystems services it provides continue to decline at an alarming rate, despite being critical for the survival and wellbeing of humans. Effectively financing biodiversity conservation faces a number of daunting challenges, including free riding, perverse incentives, and a lack of legal or market mechanisms to properly value biodiversity assets. In addition, accountability and outcomes are often elusive, partly because performance is usually based on a transaction as opposed to some outcome. Consequently, the environmental sector stands to gain from developing and implementing innovative finance approaches, defined as generating new sources of funding and/or increasing the return on investment from current funding sources by improve the efficiency and effectiveness of financing. The environmental sector could learn from how other sectors are financing social programs in innovative ways. In the health and poverty alleviation sectors, a number of recent financial innovations have produced financial incentives for individuals, governments, and the private sector to deliver better results. Those outcome-based instruments, which include conditional cash transfers, cash on delivery aid, buy-downs, output-based aid, and advance market commitments, have been successful in achieving targeted outcomes. While there are many implementation challenges, such outcome-based approaches may deliver better environmental performance and conservation and do so more cost-effectively