Economic Incentives for Biodiversity Conservation on Farmland

In this paper, we review recent advances in the field of economic incentives for biodiversity conservation, focusing on incentives offered to private landowners to change how they manage land. Due to market failures, profit-maximizing land-use decisions are rarely consistent with optimal provision of biodiversity. As a result, it has been argued that additional financial incentives are needed to slow global biodiversity decline and aid biodiversity recovery. The paper organizes recent literature along four thematic lines: paying for results rather than actions, incentives for spatial coordination, collective participation schemes, and biodiversity offset markets.