Your Letters and Comments
Auditing Conservation
There is no question that conservationists need to have clear goals and know whether and how well they are reaching them. “Auditing Conservation” in the Summer 2003 issue of Conservation In Practice makes this point well but it is naïve on a number of other counts, leading to bad advice.
The author seems poorly informed about the conservation community. Of the dozens of large and small NGOs I have worked with over the years, I’ve seen much thoughtful goal setting, strategizing, monitoring, and adjustments based on monitoring. (I find it difficult to believe that an organization as sophisticated as The Nature Conservancy would actually count success only by dollars and acres.)
Business is not a model to emulate. Leaving Enron, Arthur Anderson, and their many cohorts aside, GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) and the auditing industry leave much to be desired. The industry produces little of value to outsiders because its tools are unreliable and formulaic. Some products can be useful to inside managers, but this is more dependent on good people than on methodology. The biggest problem with GAAP and the auditing industry as a model is that they consume enormous resources far out of proportion to useful products — resources that conservationists don’t have. Auditing bureaucracies are another tail trying to wag the dog, always demanding more resources.
Conservationists have alternatives. In 1998, Margolius and Salafsky (1) published an excellent book on monitoring and managing for conservation success. Nonprofit organizations like TREC (Training Resources for the Environmental Community) exist to help conservation NGOs make well considered use of management tools.
Contributors have a right to know where their money is going and that it is being well spent. But if the price of support is adopting expensive business tools that work poorly, we should ask whether that support is worth it. There’s one set of books every conservationist should keep an eye on. At the peak of foundation giving a couple of years ago, over $23 billion was disbursed to charity, about 4 percent going to conservation. The same year, the U.S. GDP was in excess of $10 trillion, much of that generated at the expense of nature. That’s a gap that must be remedied, and GAAP won’t help.
DAVID JOHNS
Division of Political Science, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
Literature Cited:
1. Margoluis, R. and N. Salafsky. 1998. Measures of Success, Designing, Managing and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects. Island Press, Washington DC.
The author responds:
Many of the conservationists I interviewed while reporting on “Auditing Conservation” believe that one way to increase the percentage of charitable giving that goes to conservation is to publicly report reliable results. NGOs around the world are devoting increasing attention and resources to rigorously evaluating their strategies by trying to measure the outcomes of their work. Much like the Conservation Measures Partnership, they are developing ways to publicly report their results so that they can be reliably evaluated by anyone interested in their work. They see this as essential for increasing the market share of GDP that goes to the growing and increasingly important work carried out by NGOs worldwide. I interviewed a wide cross-section of players in the conservation field and asked each of them what percentage of a project’s budget should be spent on measuring and evaluating performance. The answers ranged from around 5 to 15 percent. The lower range might be adequate for an after-the-fact evaluation. A well designed performance measurement system that was built in from the beginning to ensure ongoing learning could justifiably take even more of the budget. Around 10 percent was the ballpark entry-level figure for a project to seriously learn from rigorously examining its work. Think of it this way, one scientist told me: If you spent $100,000 of a $1 million conservation project on measuring performance and learned that one of your strategies was 10 times more effective than another, would it change how you spent the next $1 million on conservation? Would the return on investment for the $100,000 spent measuring your performance and auditing the results be worth it?
JON CHRISTENSEN
GIS Conservation Planning
Several important issues have recently been raised regarding the use of GIS in conservation planning, first in an article by Stokes and Morrison (Winter 2003) and second in a response to that article by Hartley and Strittholt (Spring 2003). Although the parties disputed some of the details of the redwood ecosystem model, they seemed to agree on the fundamental point that GIS is a valuable tool when used as part of a larger conservation planning process. We feel that the very existence of this debate speaks to the larger issue of the appropriate use and distribution of GIS model results.
All of the pitfalls raised by Stokes and Morrison, such as bad data, arbitrary scoring cutoffs, scale issues, lack of ground truthing, etc., can be appropriately addressed by the team conducting the model analysis and the stakeholders working directly with that team. The modeling team spends endless hours carefully compiling data, developing scoring and weighting systems, modeling alternative scenarios, discovering flaws, updating information, and using model outputs to inform decision-making. Such intimacy with the entire modeling process allows the team to make educated and intuitive decisions about the appropriate modifications and uses of the model. This seemed to be the case in the redwood ecosystem project as described by Hartley and Strittholt and has certainly been our experience in the extensive GIS modeling we have conducted for the Florida Forever environmental land acquisition program.
The problem arises when the results of careful GIS analysis show up as maps or reports seen by the public at large. Inevitably, these products generate requests for access to the underlying GIS data. Modelers should encourage access to their data for independent evaluation, but more often these requests come from casual users who are attracted to the model as an instant data resource. Unfortunately, no amount of metadata or technical documentation can communicate to secondary users the level of experience and understanding gained by the modeling team. As a result, it is often such unintended uses that lead to the worst breaches of modeling etiquette: interpreting the model results as unquestionable fact and failing to examine the model assumptions. However, in this era when free access to information is considered an entitlement, restricting access to GIS data may give the modeling team a reputation of being uncooperative or lead outsiders to view the model itself as suspect.
In addition to focusing on common weaknesses of GIS modeling, we suggest that more attention be paid to educating the broader audience of GIS users on the need for informed use of data. Ease of electronic file transfer does not grant license to circumvent the most important phases of the modeling process. If model results are to be used for purposes other than those originally intended, users should be as familiar as possible with the model’s construction and be prepared to address shortcomings that arise when the model is taken out of context.
JON OETTING
AMY KNIGHT
GARY KNIGHT
Florida Natural Areas Inventory
Wildlife Compensation
We read with interest “Taking the Bite out of Wildlife Damage” by Nyhus et al., (Spring 2003). Through a two-year assessment of how conservation addresses conflicts with local communities in Africa and North America (1), The Jane Goodall Institute made similar discoveries. We noted that relationships between communities and neighboring protected areas are often the most problematic. In addition, however, we sought to understand the underlying and deep-rooted issues that cause disputes such as control of public and private lands, personal property rights, government interference, and social identity.
Our analysis highlights the need to pay attention to psychological transitions and relationship building between the conservation project or agency and the communities and stakeholders. Conservation groups often present opportunities for community engagement that are rejected. This occurs because the community members have not accepted, for example, the permanency of the national park or new policy. For instance, disputes over crop raiding by conservation flagship species such as gorillas and elephants (contrasted to the majority of crop raiding damage done by monkeys and bush-pigs) often cause resentment in local communities. These deep-rooted identity issues cannot be adequately resolved through negotiation or monetary compensation; so disputes continue, and compensation programs are often abused and dissolved. This was the case in all six of the Africa case studies in our study.
However, when conservationists are open to adopting principles from “community reconciliation” and to focusing more attention on relationship building, communities can assist in biodiversity conservation goals. In these instances, compensation schemes may adequately address the dispute-level needs, only because the underlying and deep-rooted issues have been valued through other mechanisms.
CHRISTINA ELLIS
The Jane Goodall Institute
JULIE STEIN
The Andrus Family Fund
Literature Cited:
1. Conciatore, J., C. Ellis, and I. Koziell eds. 2003. Approaching the Table: A Framework for Transforming Conservation-Based Conflict into Opportunity. The Jane Goodall Institute, Silver Spring, MD, & the International Institute for Environment and Development, U.K.
