Biomath Seminar
Tuesday 2/12/06

Speaker: Brett Matzuka, Biomathematics Graduate student


Title: Leverage: an ecological economic factor to optimally prioritizing conservation funding

Abstract:
The rate at which habitat is being destroyed is alarming, and current
conservational actions are inadequate to prevent this decline. 
At the heart of this global issue is how to distribute limited resources
amongst identified priority regions for biodiversity conservation.
Due to the recent focus on the immediate need for conservation 
in these priority regions, international organizations have been able to
construct strategies for raising funds through the championing of different
priorities. These campaigns have helped empower people to feel they 
make a difference and have helped to reestablish the connection between 
the environment and society. This concept of people seeing their contributions
making a difference leads to an important feedback in economic 
processes central to prioritizing funding, known as leverage. Leverage is 
the ability of a region to generate more funding if money is allocated to 
that region; it is very important to the problem of allocating funding 
among multiple priority regions. We propose a simple dynamic cost-benefit 
model for optimally allocating resources among priority regions which 
incorporates leverage, with the objective of maximizing the number of species 
conserved. Using optimal control theory, we formulate a optimal spending 
strategy to meet our objective. We use this to evaluate current allocation 
to multiple priority regions in the face of differing economic, ecological, 
and environmental factors. We find that with the incorporation of leverage,
current international allocation strategies are not over spending in 
economically rich countries such as the US, but are very similar to
our optimal allocation strategy.