Public support for sustainable commercial harvesting of wildlife: An Australian case study

This paper surveys a sample of 204 members of the Australian public to determine their attitude to the sustainable commercial harvesting of wildlife generally, and considers their specific support for the sustainable commercial harvesting of each of 24 Australian native species. The general attitude of the sample to wildlife harvesting is related to their attitude to nature conservation. The relationship between respondents’ support for the sustainable commercial harvesting of each of the species and their degree of endangerment based on IUCN Red List rankings is established and found to be an inverse one. Support for the commercial sustainable use of each of the species is compared with the willingness of respondents to pay for their conservation. Support for sustainable commercial harvesting of species is found to be inversely related to the willingness of respondents to pay is for a particular species’ conservation. In turn, this willingness to pay is found to rise with the degree of endangerment of species. While the likeability of a species has some influence on whether there is support or not for its commercial harvesting, it does not seem to be the predominant influence— the degree of endangerment of a species appears to be the major influence here. Even so, this does not imply majority support for the harvest of all species that are not threatened; rather, majority support for harvest was observed only for some species known to be abundant. None of the species that appear in the Red List have majority support for harvesting. Implications are outlined of the results for the policy of promoting wildlife conservation by means of sustainable use.

Economics of Environmental Conservation

This fully updated and comprehensively revised edition of a classic text concentrates on the economics of conserving the living environment. It begins by covering the ethical foundations and basic economic paradigms’ essential for understanding and assessing ecological economics. General strategies for global environmental conservation, policies for government intervention, developing countries, preserving wildlife and biodiversity, open-access to and common property in natural resources, conservation of natural areas, forestry, agriculture and the environment, tourism, sustainable development and demographic change are also all covered.

Erosion/productivity modelling of maize farming in the Philippine uplands part II: Simulation of alternative farming methods

A version of the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) capable of simulating the key agronomic aspects of intercropping maize between legume shrub hedgerows was described and parameterised in the first paper of this series (Nelson et al., this issue). In this paper, APSIM is used to simulate maize yields and soil erosion from traditional open-field farming and hedgerow intercropping in the Philippine uplands. Two variants of open-field farming were simulated using APSIM, continuous and fallow, for comparison with intercropping maize between leguminous shrub hedgerows. Continuous open-field maize farming was predicted to be unsustainable in the long term, while fallow open-field farming was predicted to slow productivity decline by spreading the effect of erosion over a larger cropping area. Hedgerow intercropping was predicted to reduce erosion by maintaining soil surface cover during periods of intense rainfall, contributing to sustainable production of maize in the long term. In the third paper in this series, Nelson et al. (this issue) use cost-benefit analysis to compare the economic viability of hedgerow intercropping relative to traditional open-field farming of maize in relatively inaccessible upland areas. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.