International Development and Environmental Sustainability:
   Trade-offs Between Conservation and Development

Funded by MacArthur Foundation, the project “advancing conservation in a social context” aims at understanding the nature of trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and development with a focus on three tropical countries: Peru, Tanzania and Vietnam. More information about the project is available at www.tradeoffs.org. I recently joined the project team to develop and test participatory multiple criteria decision making models for eliciting valuation trade-offs.

Relevant papers and presentations:

Papers

• Hirsch, P. D., Adams, B., Brosius, J. P., Zia, A., Bariola, N., and Dammert, J. L. (In Review) Acknowledging Trade-offs, Embracing Complexity: A Challenge for Conservation. Conservation Biology
• Zia, A. et al. (In Preparation) Eliciting value trade-offs at multiple spatial scales: an application of deliberative multi-criteria decision analysis, Ruaha National Park Tanzania
• Zia et al. (In Preparation) The evidence for negative discount rates: assessing inter-temporal valuation trade-offs between conservation and development strategies in Bai Tu Long National Park Vietnam