How to Design and Evaluate Conservation Policy for a Changing World?

Dr. Payal Shah uses economic theory and statistical methods, combined with tools from ecology and biogeography, to evaluate the impact of conservation policies on protecting biodiversity and ecosystems and develop optimal strategies for conservation efforts in the face of climate change. Climate change threatens species diversity and ecosystem services and causes uncertain changes in future spatial patterns of conservation-related outcomes. This uncertainty makes it difficult to implement standard conservation and land management paradigms. Her research will develop new methods for effectively managing the spatial and temporal risk that climate uncertainty creates and guide conservation and adaptation planning decisions for a range of ecological settings.

Photo Credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT

Project Collaborators

• Fumiko Ishihama, Senior Researcher, Center for Environmental Biology and Ecosystem Studies, National Institute for Environmental Studies
• Rintaro Yamaguchi, Researcher, Center for Social and Environmental Systems Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies
• Amy Ando, Professor, Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Glenn Guntenspergen, Research Ecologist, United States Geological Survey
• Kathy Baylis, Professor, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Jonah Busch, Chief Economist, Earth Innovation Institute
• Charles Sims, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• Valentin Popov, Lecturer, Center for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling, University of St. Andrews
• Jonathan Rhodes, Professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland
• Rebecca Runting, Lecturer, School of Geography, The University of Melbourne
• Evan Economo, Professor, Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit, OIST Graduate University
• Satoshi Mitarai, Associate Professor, Marine Biophysics Unit, OIST Graduate University

Project Publications

• Shah, Payal and Baylis, Kathy. 2015. Evaluating the Impact of Protection on Deforestation in Indonesia between 2000 and 2010 using Remote Sensing Data. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0124872. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124872
• Shah, Payal and Ando, Amy W. 2015. Downside vs. symmetric risk in natural resource portfolio design to manage climate-change uncertainty. Land Economics, 91(4), 664-687.
• Shah, Payal and Ando, Amy W. 2016. Permanent and Temporary Policy Incentives for Conservation under Stochastic Returns from Competing Land Uses. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, p.aaw032.
• Shah, Payal, Mallory, Mindy, Ando, Amy W., and Guntenspergen, Glenn. 2016. Fine‐resolution conservation planning with limited climate‐change information. Conservation Biology.
• Schwanitz, Valeria Jana, Wierling, August and Shah, Payal. 2017. Assessing the Impact of Renewable Energy on Regional Sustainability—A Comparative Study of Sogn og Fjordane (Norway) and Okinawa (Japan). Sustainability, 9(11), p.1969.Shah, Payal, Dissanayake, Sahan, T. M., Fujita, Yoko and Nunes, Paulo, A.D. 2019. Impact of a local, coastal community based management regime when defining marine protected areas: Empirical results from a study in Okinawa, Japan. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213354
• Yamaguchi, Rintaro and Shah, Payal. 2020. Spatial Discounting of Ecosystem Services. Resource and Energy Economics, 101186.
• Shah, Payal, Baylis, Kathy, Busch, Jonah and Engelmann, Jens. What determines the effectiveness of national protected area networks? In review
• Popov, Valentin, Shah, Payal, Runting, Rebecca and Rhodes, Jonathan. Managing risk and uncertainty in systematic conservation planning with insufficient information. In review