BIOECON ho! Conservation of what, and for whom?

Photo courtesy of Brooks Kaiser

Photo courtesy of Brooks Kaiser

I had the great good fortune to attend the 18th Annual BIOECON Conference in Cambridge England last month. The presenters represented a stellar sampling of the best researchers the economics of conservation and resource management worldwide. My keynote talk, “Uncertainty in and distribution of the benefits of conservation,” gave me an opportunity to make the case to our community that we should work more on understanding how the benefits of conservation are distributed among groups of people in our societies, and how we can modify conservation planning to reduce the chances of conservation catastrophe resulting from climate change. I welcome the international conversation we can have about those issues, given the diverse nature of both social inequities and climate change impacts across countries.

Hope to see those folks and many others at BIOECON next year in Tilburg.