Sustainable coffee: A review of the diverse initiatives and governance dimensions of global coffee supply chains.

With a global footprint of 10 million hectares across 12.5 million farms, coffee is among the world's most traded commodities. The coffee industry has launched a variety of initiatives designed to reduce coffee's contribution to climate change and biodiversity loss and enhance the socio-economic conditions of coffee producers. We systematically reviewed the literature on the sustainability and governance of coffee production and developed a typology of eleven sustainability initiatives. Our review shows that coffee sustainability research has focused primarily on the economic outcomes of certification schemes. The typology expands our knowledge of novel sustainability initiatives being led by coffee farming communities themselves, allowing for an improved consideration of power dynamics in sustainability governance. Sustainability initiatives governed by local actors can improve sustainability outcomes by empowering local decision makers to assess direct risks and benefits of sustainable practices to the local environment, economy, and culture.

Evaluating the impact of private land conservation with synthetic control design.

Programs to protect biodiversity on private land are increasingly being used worldwide. To understand the efficacy of such programs, it is important to determine their impact: the difference between the program's outcome and what would have happened without the program. Typically, these programs are evaluated by estimating the average program-level impact, which readily allows comparisons between programs or regions, but masks important heterogeneity in impact across the individual conservation interventions. We used synthetic control design, statistical matching, and time-series data to estimate the impact of individual protected areas over time and combined individual-level impacts to estimate program-level impact with a meta-analytic approach. We applied the method to private protected areas governed by conservation covenants (legally binding on-title agreements to protect biodiversity) in the Goldfields region of Victoria, Australia using woody vegetation cover as our outcome variable. We compared our results with traditional approaches to estimating program-level impact based on a subset of covenants that were the same age. Our results showed an overall program-level impact of a 0.3-0.8% increase in woody vegetation cover per year. However, there was significant heterogeneity in the temporal pattern of impact for individual covenants, ranging from -4 to +7% change in woody vegetation cover per year. Results of our approach were consistent with results based on traditional approaches to estimating program-level impact. Our study provides a transparent and robust workflow to estimate individual and program-level impacts of private protected areas.

Evaluación del impacto del suelo privado de conservación con diseño de control sintético Resumen Los programas de protección de la biodiversidad en suelo privado se utilizan cada vez más en todo el mundo. Para entender la eficacia de estos programas, es importante determinar la diferencia entre el resultado del programa y lo que habría ocurrido sin él. Normalmente, estos programas se evalúan estimando el impacto medio a nivel de programa, lo que permite fácilmente las comparaciones entre programas o regiones, pero oculta una importante heterogeneidad en el impacto entre las intervenciones individuales de conservación. Utilizamos un diseño de control sintético, un emparejamiento estadístico y datos de series temporales para estimar el impacto de las áreas protegidas individuales a lo largo del tiempo y combinamos los impactos a nivel individual para estimar el impacto a nivel de programa con un enfoque meta-analítico. Aplicamos el método a áreas protegidas privadas regidas por acuerdos de conservación (acuerdos con vínculos jurídicos sobre la titularidad para proteger la biodiversidad) destinados a mejorar la cubierta vegetal leñosa en la región de Goldfields de Victoria, Australia. Comparamos nuestros resultados con los métodos tradicionales de estimación del impacto a nivel de programa basados en un subconjunto de pactos de la misma antigüedad. Nuestros resultados mostraron un impacto global a nivel de programa de un aumento del 0.3-0.8% de la cubierta vegetal leñosa al año. Sin embargo, hubo una heterogeneidad significativa en el patrón temporal del impacto para los pactos individuales, que osciló entre −4 y +7% de cambio en la cubierta vegetal leñosa por año. Los resultados de nuestra estrategia fueron consecuentes con los resultados basados en las estrategias tradicionales usadas para estimar el impacto a nivel de programa. Nuestro estudio proporciona un flujo de trabajo transparente y sólido para estimar el impacto individual a nivel de programa de las áreas protegidas privadas.

Evaluating the impact of biodiversity offsetting on native vegetation.

Biodiversity offsetting is a globally influential policy mechanism for reconciling trade-offs between development and biodiversity loss. However, there is little robust evidence of its effectiveness. We evaluated the outcomes of a jurisdictional offsetting policy (Victoria, Australia). Offsets under Victoria's Native Vegetation Framework (2002-2013) aimed to prevent loss and degradation of remnant vegetation, and generate gains in vegetation extent and quality. We categorised offsets into those with near-complete baseline woody vegetation cover ("avoided loss", 2702 ha) and with incomplete cover ("regeneration", 501 ha), and evaluated impacts on woody vegetation extent from 2008 to 2018. We used two approaches to estimate the counterfactual. First, we used statistical matching on biophysical covariates: a common approach in conservation impact evaluation, but which risks ignoring potentially important psychosocial confounders. Second, we compared changes in offsets with changes in sites that were not offsets for the study duration but were later enrolled as offsets, to partially account for self-selection bias (where landholders enrolling land may have shared characteristics affecting how they manage land). Matching on biophysical covariates, we estimated that regeneration offsets increased woody vegetation extent by 1.9%-3.6%/year more than non-offset sites (138-180 ha from 2008 to 2018) but this effect weakened with the second approach (0.3%-1.9%/year more than non-offset sites; 19-97 ha from 2008 to 2018) and disappeared when a single outlier land parcel was removed. Neither approach detected any impact of avoided loss offsets. We cannot conclusively demonstrate whether the policy goal of 'net gain' (NG) was achieved because of data limitations. However, given our evidence that the majority of increases in woody vegetation extent were not additional (would have happened without the scheme), a NG outcome seems unlikely. The results highlight the importance of considering self-selection bias in the design and evaluation of regulatory biodiversity offsetting policy, and the challenges of conducting robust impact evaluations of jurisdictional biodiversity offsetting policies.

Reconciling multiple counterfactuals when evaluating biodiversity conservation impact in social-ecological systems.

When evaluating the impact of a biodiversity conservation intervention, a counterfactual is typically needed. Counterfactuals are possible alternative system trajectories in the absence of an intervention. Comparing observed outcomes against the chosen counterfactual allows the impact (change attributable to the intervention) to be determined. Because counterfactuals by definition never occur, they must be estimated. Sometimes, there may be many plausible counterfactuals, including various drivers of biodiversity change and defined on a range of spatial or temporal scales. Here, we posit that, by definition, conservation interventions always take place in social-ecological systems (SES) (i.e., ecological systems integrated with human actors). Evaluating the impact of an intervention in an SES, therefore, means taking into account the counterfactuals assumed by different human actors. Use of different counterfactuals by different actors will give rise to perceived differences in the impacts of interventions, which may lead to disagreement about its success or the effectiveness of the underlying approach. Despite that there are biophysical biodiversity trends, it is often true that no single counterfactual is definitively the right one for conservation assessment, so multiple evaluations of intervention efficacy could be considered justifiable. Therefore, we propose calculating the sum of perceived differences, which captures the range of impact estimates associated with different actors in a given SES. The sum of perceived differences gives some indication of how closely actors in an SES agree on the impacts of an intervention. We applied the concept of perceived differences to a set of global, national, and regional case studies (e.g., global realization of Aichi Target 11 for marine protected areas, effect of biodiversity offsetting on vegetation condition in Australia, and influence of conservation measures on an endangered ungulate in Central Asia). We explored approaches for minimizing the sum, including a combination of negotiation and structured decision making, careful alignment of expectations on scope and measurement, and explicit recognition of any intractable differences between stakeholders.

Reconciliación de Múltiples Hipótesis de Contraste al Evaluar el Impacto de la Conservación de la Biodiversidad en los Sistemas Socio-Ecológicos Resumen Cuando se evalúa el impacto de una intervención de conservación de la biodiversidad, generalmente se requiere una hipótesis de contraste. Las hipótesis de contraste son las posibles trayectorias alternativas del sistema en ausencia de una intervención. La comparación de los resultados observados con la hipótesis de contraste elegida permite que se determine el impacto (cambio atribuible a la intervención). Ya que las hipótesis de contraste por definición nunca ocurren, éstas deben ser estimadas. En algunos casos es posible que existan muchas hipótesis de contraste, incluyendo a muchos conductores del cambio en la biodiversidad, y que estén definidas bajo una gama de escalas espaciales o temporales. En este artículo planteamos que, por definición, las intervenciones de conservación siempre ocurren en sistemas socioecológicos (SES) (es decir, sistemas ecológicos integrados con actores humanos). Por lo tanto, la evaluación del impacto de una intervención en un SES implica la consideración de las hipótesis de contraste asumidas por los diferentes actores humanos. El uso de diferentes hipótesis de contraste por los diferentes actores hará que surjan diferencias percibidas en los impactos de las intervenciones, lo que puede llegar a discrepancias sobre su éxito o sobre la efectividad de la estrategia subyacente. A pesar de que existen tendencias biofísicas de la biodiversidad, con frecuencia es cierto que no hay una sola hipótesis de contraste que sea correcta de manera definitiva para la evaluación de la conservación, por lo que múltiples evaluaciones de la eficiencia de la intervención podrían considerarse como justificables. Así, proponemos que se calcule la suma de las diferencias percibidas, la cual captura la gama de las estimaciones de impacto asociadas con diferentes actores en un SES dado. La suma de las diferencias percibidas nos da algún tipo de indicación sobre cuán de acuerdo están los actores de un SES sobre los impactos de una intervención. Aplicamos el concepto de diferencias percibidas a un conjunto de estudios de caso mundiales, nacionales y regionales (p. ej.: la realización mundial del Objetivo Aichi 11 para las áreas marinas protegidas, el efecto de la compensación de la biodiversidad sobre las condiciones botánicas en Australia y la influencia de las medidas de conservación sobre un ungulado en peligro en Asia central). Exploramos las estrategias para minimizar la suma, incluyendo una combinación de negociación y toma estructurada de decisiones, la alineación cuidadosa de las expectativas sobre el enfoque y la medida y el reconocimiento explícito de cualquier diferencia intratable entre los actores sociales.

Author Correction: Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Five lessons to guide more effective biodiversity conservation message framing.

Communication and advocacy approaches that influence attitudes and behaviors are key to addressing conservation problems, and the way an issue is framed can affect how people view, judge, and respond to an issue. Responses to conservation interventions can also be influenced by subtle wording changes in statements that may appeal to different values, activate social norms, influence a person's affect or mood, or trigger certain biases, each of which can differently influence the resulting engagement, attitudes, and behavior. We contend that by strategically considering how conservation communications are framed, they can be made more effective with little or no additional cost. Key framing considerations include, emphasizing things that matter to the audience, evoking helpful social norms, reducing psychological distance, leveraging useful biases, and, where practicable, testing messages. These lessons will help communicators think strategically about how to frame messages for greater effect.

Cinco Lecciones para Dirigir un Encuadre Más Efectivo del Mensaje de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Resumen Las estrategias de comunicación y defensa que influyen sobre las actitudes y comportamientos son muy importantes para abordar los problemas de conservación. La manera en la que se encuadra un tema puede afectar cómo las personas lo ven, lo juzgan y cómo responden a él. Las respuestas a las intervenciones de conservación también pueden estar influenciadas por cambios sutiles en la redacción de las declaraciones que pueden exhortar a valores distintos, activar las normas sociales, influir sobre el afecto o humor de una persona o producir ciertos sesgos, cada uno de los cuales puede influir de manera diferente sobre la participación, el comportamiento y las actitudes resultantes. Sostenemos que al considerar estratégicamente cómo se encuadra la comunicación de la conservación, ésta puede volverse más efectiva con muy poco o ningún valor adicional. Algunas consideraciones importantes son el énfasis en las cosas que le importan al público, la evocación de las normas sociales útiles, la reducción de la distancia psicológica, el aprovechamiento de los sesgos útiles y, en donde pueda practicarse, el ensayo de mensajes. Estas lecciones ayudarán a los comunicadores a pensar estratégicamente sobre cómo encuadrar sus mensajes para obtener un mayor efecto.

Offsetting impacts of development on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Offsetting-trading losses in one place for commensurate gains in another-is a tool used to mitigate environmental impacts of development. Biodiversity and carbon are the most widely used targets of offsets; however, other ecosystem services are increasingly traded, introducing new risks to the environment and people. Here, we provide guidance on how to "trade with minimal trade-offs"- i.e. how to offset impacts on biodiversity without negatively affecting ecosystem services and vice versa. We briefly survey the literature on offsetting biodiversity, carbon and other ecosystem services, revealing that each subfield addresses unique issues (often overlooking those raised by others) and rarely assesses potential trade-offs. We discuss key differences between offsets that trade biodiversity and those that trade ecosystem services, conceptualise links between these different targets in an offsetting context and describe three broad approaches to manage potential trade-offs. We conclude by proposing a research agenda to strengthen the outcomes of offsetting policies that are emerging internationally.

Global synthesis of conservation studies reveals the importance of small habitat patches for biodiversity.

Island biogeography theory posits that species richness increases with island size and decreases with isolation. This logic underpins much conservation policy and regulation, with preference given to conserving large, highly connected areas, and relative ambivalence shown toward protecting small, isolated habitat patches. We undertook a global synthesis of the relationship between the conservation value of habitat patches and their size and isolation, based on 31 systematic conservation planning studies across four continents. We found that small, isolated patches are inordinately important for biodiversity conservation. Our results provide a powerful argument for redressing the neglect of small, isolated habitat patches, for urgently prioritizing their restoration, and for avoiding simplistic application of island biogeography theory in conservation decisions.

Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.

International commitments for ecosystem restoration add up to one-quarter of the world's arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here, we present a restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options. Using an actual large-scale restoration target of the Atlantic Forest hotspot, we show that our approach can deliver an eightfold increase in cost-effectiveness for biodiversity conservation compared with a baseline of non-systematic restoration. A compromise solution avoids 26% of the biome's current extinction debt of 2,864 plant and animal species (an increase of 257% compared with the baseline). Moreover, this solution sequesters 1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (a 105% increase) while reducing costs by US$28 billion (a 57% decrease). Seizing similar opportunities elsewhere would offer substantial contributions to some of the greatest challenges for humankind.

Factors influencing property selection for conservation revolving funds.

Finding sustainable ways to increase the amount of private land protected for biodiversity is challenging for many conservation organizations. In some countries, organizations use revolving-fund programs, whereby land is purchased and then sold to conservation-minded owners under condition they enter into a conservation covenant or easement. The sale proceeds are used to purchase, protect, and sell additional properties, incrementally increasing the amount of protected private land. Because the effectiveness of this approach relies on selecting appropriate properties, we explored factors currently considered by practitioners and how these are integrated into decision making. We conducted exploratory, semistructured interviews with managers from each of the 5 major revolving funds in Australia. Responses indicated although conservation factors are important, financial and social factors are also highly influential. A major determinant was whether the property could be resold within a reasonable period at a price that replenishes the fund. To facilitate resale, often selected properties include the potential for the construction of a dwelling. Practitioners face with clear trade-offs between conservation, financial, amenity, and other factors in selecting properties and 3 main challenges: recovering the costs of acquisition, protection, and resale; reselling the property; and meeting conservation goals. Our findings suggest the complexity of these decisions may constrain revolving-fund effectiveness. Drawing from participant responses, we identified potential strategies to mitigate these risks, such as providing adequate recreational space without jeopardizing ecological assets. We suggest managers could benefit from a shared-learning and adaptive approach to property selection given the commonalities between programs. Understanding how practitioners deal with complex decisions in the implementation of revolving funds helps identify future research to improve the performance of this conservation tool.

Metaresearch for Evaluating Reproducibility in Ecology and Evolution.

Recent replication projects in other disciplines have uncovered disturbingly low levels of reproducibility, suggesting that those research literatures may contain unverifiable claims. The conditions contributing to irreproducibility in other disciplines are also present in ecology. These include a large discrepancy between the proportion of "positive" or "significant" results and the average statistical power of empirical research, incomplete reporting of sampling stopping rules and results, journal policies that discourage replication studies, and a prevailing publish-or-perish research culture that encourages questionable research practices. We argue that these conditions constitute sufficient reason to systematically evaluate the reproducibility of the evidence base in ecology and evolution. In some cases, the direct replication of ecological research is difficult because of strong temporal and spatial dependencies, so here, we propose metaresearch projects that will provide proxy measures of reproducibility.

Quantifying the conservation gains from shared access to linear infrastructure.

The proliferation of linear infrastructure such as roads and railways is a major global driver of cumulative biodiversity loss. One strategy for reducing habitat loss associated with development is to encourage linear infrastructure providers and users to share infrastructure networks. We quantified the reductions in biodiversity impact and capital costs under linear infrastructure sharing of a range of potential mine to port transportation links for 47 mine locations operated by 28 separate companies in the Upper Spencer Gulf Region of South Australia. We mapped transport links based on least-cost pathways for different levels of linear-infrastructure sharing and used expert-elicited impacts of linear infrastructure to estimate the consequences for biodiversity. Capital costs were calculated based on estimates of construction costs, compensation payments, and transaction costs. We evaluated proposed mine-port links by comparing biodiversity impacts and capital costs across 3 scenarios: an independent scenario, where no infrastructure is shared; a restricted-access scenario, where the largest mining companies share infrastructure but exclude smaller mining companies from sharing; and a shared scenario where all mining companies share linear infrastructure. Fully shared development of linear infrastructure reduced overall biodiversity impacts by 76% and reduced capital costs by 64% compared with the independent scenario. However, there was considerable variation among companies. Our restricted-access scenario showed only modest biodiversity benefits relative to the independent scenario, indicating that reductions are likely to be limited if the dominant mining companies restrict access to infrastructure, which often occurs without policies that promote sharing of infrastructure. Our research helps illuminate the circumstances under which infrastructure sharing can minimize the biodiversity impacts of development.

Ensemble ecosystem modeling for predicting ecosystem response to predator reintroduction.

Introducing a new or extirpated species to an ecosystem is risky, and managers need quantitative methods that can predict the consequences for the recipient ecosystem. Proponents of keystone predator reintroductions commonly argue that the presence of the predator will restore ecosystem function, but this has not always been the case, and mathematical modeling has an important role to play in predicting how reintroductions will likely play out. We devised an ensemble modeling method that integrates species interaction networks and dynamic community simulations and used it to describe the range of plausible consequences of 2 keystone-predator reintroductions: wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and dingoes (Canis dingo) to a national park in Australia. Although previous methods for predicting ecosystem responses to such interventions focused on predicting changes around a given equilibrium, we used Lotka-Volterra equations to predict changing abundances through time. We applied our method to interaction networks for wolves in Yellowstone National Park and for dingoes in Australia. Our model replicated the observed dynamics in Yellowstone National Park and produced a larger range of potential outcomes for the dingo network. However, we also found that changes in small vertebrates or invertebrates gave a good indication about the potential future state of the system. Our method allowed us to predict when the systems were far from equilibrium. Our results showed that the method can also be used to predict which species may increase or decrease following a reintroduction and can identify species that are important to monitor (i.e., species whose changes in abundance give extra insight into broad changes in the system). Ensemble ecosystem modeling can also be applied to assess the ecosystem-wide implications of other types of interventions including assisted migration, biocontrol, and invasive species eradication.

Prioritizing Urban Habitats for Connectivity Conservation: Integrating Centrality and Ecological Metrics.

Connectivity among fragmented areas of habitat has long been acknowledged as important for the viability of biological conservation, especially within highly modified landscapes. Identifying important habitat patches in ecological connectivity is a priority for many conservation strategies, and the application of 'graph theory' has been shown to provide useful information on connectivity. Despite the large number of metrics for connectivity derived from graph theory, only a small number have been compared in terms of the importance they assign to nodes in a network. This paper presents a study that aims to define a new set of metrics and compares these with traditional graph-based metrics, used in the prioritization of habitat patches for ecological connectivity. The metrics measured consist of "topological" metrics, "ecological metrics," and "integrated metrics," Integrated metrics are a combination of topological and ecological metrics. Eight metrics were applied to the habitat network for the fat-tailed dunnart within Greater Melbourne, Australia. A non-directional network was developed in which nodes were linked to adjacent nodes. These links were then weighted by the effective distance between patches. By applying each of the eight metrics for the study network, nodes were ranked according to their contribution to the overall network connectivity. The structured comparison revealed the similarity and differences in the way the habitat for the fat-tailed dunnart was ranked based on different classes of metrics. Due to the differences in the way the metrics operate, a suitable metric should be chosen that best meets the objectives established by the decision maker.

Integrating biological and social values when prioritizing places for biodiversity conservation.

The consideration of information on social values in conjunction with biological data is critical for achieving both socially acceptable and scientifically defensible conservation planning outcomes. However, the influence of social values on spatial conservation priorities has received limited attention and is poorly understood. We present an approach that incorporates quantitative data on social values for conservation and social preferences for development into spatial conservation planning. We undertook a public participation GIS survey to spatially represent social values and development preferences and used species distribution models for 7 threatened fauna species to represent biological values. These spatially explicit data were simultaneously included in the conservation planning software Zonation to examine how conservation priorities changed with the inclusion of social data. Integrating spatially explicit information about social values and development preferences with biological data produced prioritizations that differed spatially from the solution based on only biological data. However, the integrated solutions protected a similar proportion of the species' distributions, indicating that Zonation effectively combined the biological and social data to produce socially feasible conservation solutions of approximately equivalent biological value. We were able to identify areas of the landscape where synergies and conflicts between different value sets are likely to occur. Identification of these synergies and conflicts will allow decision makers to target communication strategies to specific areas and ensure effective community engagement and positive conservation outcomes.

Raising the bar for systematic conservation planning.

Systematic conservation planning (SCP) represents a significant step toward cost-effective, transparent allocation of resources for biodiversity conservation. However, research demonstrates important consequences of uncertainties in SCP and of basing methods on simplified circumstances involving few real-world complexities. Current research often relies on single case studies with unknown forms and amounts of uncertainty as well as low statistical power for generalizing results. Consequently, conservation managers have little evidence for the true performance of conservation planning methods in their own complex, uncertain applications. To build effective and reliable methods in SCP, there is a need for more challenging and integrated testing of their robustness to uncertainty and complexity, and much greater emphasis on generalization to real-world situations.