New Models and Methods for Efficient Land Conservation

This dissertation presents a series of essays that illustrate opportunities for improving the/neconomic efficiency of conservation easement purchases and land conservation in general./nEach essay provides concrete methods to address a current issue in conservation easement/npurchasing or valuation./nThe first essay explores the relationship between the degree to which landowners identify as/nranchers and their preferences between a lump sum and a perpetuity form of compensation./nUsing original survey data from 231 California landowners in Sonoma and Marin Counties, we/nelicit measures of rancher identity and preferences among three compensation packages for the/nsale of a conservation easement. We find that the majority of participating landowners prefer/na perpetuity over a lump sum, suggesting that conservation groups could more efficiently/nconserve land by offering a perpetuity payment option. By randomly perturbing the identity/nsalience of some landowners, we attempt to determine the causal impact of identity on/npreferences. Although our results lack statistical power, they provide suggestive evidence in/nsupport of the hypothesis that preference for a perpetuity over a lump sum is a function of/nidentity as a rancher./nThe second essay addresses one of the key challenges in calculating return on investment/n(ROI) for a conservation easement purchase. From the perspective of a land conservation/ngroup, the three components of ROI for a conservation easement are the value of ecosystems/nservices (ES) that the conserved property provides, easement price, and probability of/ndevelopment under a counterfactual scenario in which the easement had not been enacted./nIn this essay we assess the relative importance of uncertainly in ecosystem service values/ncompared to uncertainty in land development projections. To do so we estimate the value/nof the ecosystems services provided by 19 conservation easements held by a California land/ntrust, based on ES values from 9 stated preference studies. For each property we then/nconsider 3 plausible counterfactual development scenarios, resulting in a total of 27 different/nvaluations (3 counterfactuals x 9 ES values). Pairwise analysis suggests that, while the impact/nof both choices is large, the choice of counterfactual has a substantially larger impact on ES/nvalue than the choice of ES value transfer study. In our study area, choosing an alternative/ncounterfactual scenario changes the valuation by an average of 648% relative to the base case,/nwhile choosing an alternative value transfer study changes the valuation by an average of 132%./nThe third essay assesses whether the easement price information in property appraisals/ncontains any information, aside from easement price, that impacts conservation group ROI./nBefore a conservation easement is sold an appraisal is usually commissioned in order to/ndetermine the value of the conserved property before and after the easement is put into/nplace. The difference between these two values is the appraised value of the easement, which/nrepresents the value of the easement to the landowner. However, since landowners and/nconservation groups have very different objective functions, the value of the easement to/nthe landowner is not necessarily equal to the value of the easement to a conservation group./nUsing a dataset of 36 appraisals for conserved California rangeland, we test the hypothesis/nthat ecosystems service value is correlated with appraised value. We also test the hypothesis/nthat counterfactual conservation easement value, which is the value of the easement to a/nconservation group, is captured in appraised value. We find that ecosystems service value is/nhighly uncorrelated with appraised value, and that counterfactual easement value is slightly/npositively correlated with, though non-linearly related to, appraised value.

Advisor: Rausser, Gordon C