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| Identifying important areas for conserving biodiversity has attracted
much discussion, but relatively few studies have dealt with conflicting
socio-economic interests in a manner that is fully accountable. For the
Guinean-Congolian forest region, we applied quantitative methods to
select a network of coarse-scale areas sufficient to represent all
forest mammal and bird species at least once. In a separate exercise,
we prioritised 50% of the region to represent the same species as many
times as possible. In both cases, we sought to minimise potential
conflicts between conservation and other socio-economic imperatives by
considering benefit-to-cost ratios. We found that by choosing areas to
reduce conflicts, we were able to increase markedly the proportion of
selected areas with low or medium conflict and decrease the proportion
with high conflict. Nonetheless, we cannot expect that conservation
goals will always be met unless some of these conflicts are faced and
resolved. By working together with specialists from both the biological
and socio-economic fields, we show that easily implemented quantitative
tools could be useful for supporting the process of finding important
areas for biodiversity conservation, while avoiding much of the
conflict with other interests. | |
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