Conservation Tools

Biodiversity encompasses the diversity of life – the varying and different species, genes and ecosystems of the Earth. Given the myriad interconnections amongst all the forms of life, the loss of a species or variation within a species or the diminishment of habitat presents potential threats to the rest of life, including humans.

The current global rate of species extinction is between 1,000 and 10,000 times the normal and 60% of ecosystem services worldwide are either degraded or being used unsustainably. Whether one values biodiversity for the services it provides to humans or instead sees all species and ecosystems as having a right to exist, the accelerating loss of biodiversity, driven largely by the development of natural lands, makes the need for conservation ever more pressing.

Economic impact studies identify a variety of economic benefits generated by biodiversity. The studies described in this guide each analyzed one or more of these benefits, including the following:

• Enabling the agricultural and forest industry through processes such as pollination, pest control, nutrient provision, genetic diversity, and disease prevention and control
• Provision of wild harvested food products such as fish, large and small animals, and maple syrup
• Provision of medicinal plants and raw materials for pharmaceuticals
• Enabling nature-based tourism and the hunting and fishing industry
• Natural degradation of chemicals released into the environment, a significant cost savings over physical, chemical and thermal bioremediation.
• Reduced healthcare costs through the prevention of the spread of disease.
• Reduction of worldwide poverty.
• Sustaining the natural ecosystems on which humans, and therefore human economic systems, depend.

Conserving natural lands, working farms and forests, and the creation of trails and parks are often viewed in terms of their costs. Yet these often generate financial returns, both to governments and individuals, and create significant cost savings to governments in the provision in services. Preservation projects can have a greater economic return than the money initially invested into the project. This research is not meant to state that conservation is always good and development always bad. Nor is it meant to diminish the importance of the environmental reasons for conservation.

Economic impact studies identify a variety of economic benefits generated by parks. The studies described in this guide each analyzed one or more of these benefits, including:

• Increased property values
• Increased tax revenues
• Decreased medical costs through increased exercise
• Increased tourism revenue
• Improved attractiveness of communities to homebuyers and businesses
• Decreased stormwater treatment costs

Sprawling patterns of development increase travel costs; decrease the economic vitality of urban centers; increase tax burdens due to more extensive road, utility and school construction and maintenance costs; increase health care costs due to pollution from automobile-centered neighborhood designs; and cause the loss of productive agricultural and forestry lands and the loss of natural lands that support tourism and wildlife related industries. Smart growth strategies, in contrast, can reduce development costs to both governments and individuals without reducing economic activity, including the number of residential or commercial units built.

Trails stimulate business creation, influence corporate location decisions, boost spending at local businesses, increase property values, reduce medical costs by encouraging exercise, and generate tax dollars. They also of course provide low or no-cost recreational opportunities and transportation options to the public. These economic benefits of trails are not a matter of speculation. Rather, they have been documented in an array of economic impact studies conducted across the United States. The reader may conclude from the evidence presented that trail projects are appropriately viewed as investments and productive community assets.

The loss of forests, riparian buffers, wetlands and other natural lands increases the amount of pollutants and sediment in water, alters stream flows, erodes stream banks, eliminates habitat for aquatic and semi-aquatic animals, decreases the replenishment of groundwater supplies, and increases the frequency of both flooding and periods of low stream flows.