Developing metric assessments for biodiversity tenders

There is increasing interest in the use of conservation tenders involving direct payments to landholders for the provision of particular environmental services. A key challenge in designing the tenders is to evaluate the proposals that landholders submit, as these need to take account of both the level of environmental improvements generated and the cost of provision. Many conservation tenders have been focused on a quantitative assessment of environmental improvements, and hence can be considered as examples of cost-effective allocation of public funding.

A more systematic economic approach to bid evaluation in conservation tenders would be to compare the value of environmental improvements against the costs involved, generating more efficient measures of how public funding was being allocated. Key challenges are to identify how values for potential environmental improvements can be generated and how some generic level and broadly scoped values of many non-market valuation studies can be transferred into the more precise needs of individual bid assessment.

These issues are explored in this project through two main approaches. The first approach is to explore the potential for the results from previous studies to be applied into case study needs for conservation tenders using meta-analysis techniques. In this component of the study meta analysis will be used to summarise the results of different water-related and recreation-related studies to identify the potential for use in conservation or water quality auctions.

The second approach is to design a study that is specifically aimed at providing input values into a conservation tender. The case study that will be used for this study is poor water quality in catchments of the Great Barrier Reef, where there is the potential for farmers to be contracted to reduce water quality impacts. A choice modelling (CM) study will be used to identify public values for water quality improvements. Those values will then be tested in water quality tenders to explore the potential for value estimates to be directly inputted into a tender metric assessment process.

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