Ch. 5— Maintaining Biological Diversity Onsite • 123 



threatened species increases and their refuges 

 disappear. Natural areas will have to be de- 

 signed in conjunction with the goals of regional 

 development and justified on the basis of eco- 

 logical processes operating within the entire 

 developed region and not just within natural 



areas. 



Conservation has long been a criterion in 

 carefully planned development of agriculture, 

 forestry, fisheries, grazing land, and other 

 primary-industry development. But mainte- 

 nance of biological diversity is relatively newf 

 as an explicit development objective. Some 

 innovative approaches are beginning to be im- 

 plemented, including the use of conflict reso- 

 lution and systems analysis techniques in re- 

 source development planning. 



Integrated Regional Development Planning 

 (IRDP), being used by the OAS (60,66), subdi- 

 vides a region into small spatial units and ana- 

 lyzes the sectoral interactions in each, in con- 

 trast to approaches that subdivide issues into 

 sectoral components. IRDP addresses interac- 

 tions, like competition for the same goods or 

 services by tv^^o or more interest groups, and 

 analyzes changes that occur in the mix of avail- 

 able goods and services as a result of activities 

 in one sector that are detrimental to another 

 sector. 



IRDP uses systems analysis and conflict reso- 

 lution methods to distribute the costs and ben- 

 efits of development activities throughout af- 

 fected populations or sectors. Integration of all 

 the sectors— including maintenance of biologi- 

 cal diversity— is necessary because individual 

 sectoral activities may help, but often hinder, 

 activities of other sectors aimed at appropriat- 

 ing goods and services from the same or allied 

 ecosystems. Decisions about vifhich activities 

 are appropriate or how each can be adjusted 

 to reduce conflict are made through negotia- 

 tion by parties representing all the sectors that 

 are involved (67). 



A major constraint to considering diversity 

 maintenance as a development activity is that 

 the benefits of diversity are hard to calculate. 

 No economic valuation techniques exist that 

 can capture its full value. Thus, biological diver- 

 sity has not fared well under the standard cost- 

 benefit analyses applied to development activ- 

 ities. Although some efforts have been made 

 to better account for biological diversity values, 

 the results have been unsatisfactory and not 

 widely applied. (See ch. 11 for further discus- 

 sion of this topic.) 



DATA FOR ONSITE MAINTENANCE OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY 



To set priorities and to allocate funds and 

 other resources, decisionmakers need to know 

 how various ecosystems contribute to biologi- 

 cal diversity, how vulnerable they are to degra- 

 dation, how well protected they are by existing 

 programs, and what the social and economic 

 prospects are for local cooperation. Manage- 

 ment programs need details on the nutrition, 

 space, and reproductive requirements of organ- 

 isms. Most such information comes from tax- 

 onomy, biogeography, natural history, ecology, 

 anthropology, and sociology. For agricultural 

 species, information is also needed on genetics, 

 microbiology, seed technology, and physiology. 



Generally, enough is known to improve sub- 

 stantially the programs for maintaining diver- 



sity. But more and better data on many aspects 

 of this subject are badly needed, and funding 

 for conservation falls far short of the needs im- 

 plied by the apparent rates and consequences 

 of diversity loss (see ch. 3). So investments must 

 be concentrated on the most cost-effective ap- 

 proaches possible, which implies the need to 

 thoroughly understand the ecological, social, 

 and economic aspects of biological diversity 

 [77). 



Uneven Quality of Information 



The quality of data on biological diversity is 

 uneven for different ecosystems and different 

 parts of the world. For some places, such as 



