Wetland rentals for migrating birds

As the world's population grows, so does demand for land. One upshot is that setting aside big tracts to protect endangered species and carbon-rich forests is increasingly expensive. Enter the Airbnb economic model. While it's not a panacea, it provides attractive solutions for conservation as well as housing.

Much as homeowners can use Airbnb and other services to turn their living space into pop-up hotels when demand warrants it, conservationists are creating 'pop-up nature reserves' on idle land. In environments as different as North America and Africa, new programmes are preserving land through short- and long-term deals that pay people to protect nature on their own land. The innovation makes it possible to transform a binary approach to land use into something in between.

Consider how Airbnb works. Think of Minneapolis, USA during the upcoming Super Bowl, when hotel rooms are scarce and residents will be enticed to rent their homes to football fans. Something like that happens in the environmental realm, too. There is a surge in demand for protected land when migratory birds are passing through an area or when a threatened species is breeding.

In the United States, the nonprofit Nature Conservancy has been a pioneer in bringing the 'sharing economy' business model to conservation. It has been temporarily expanding wetlands for migratory birds in California's Sacramento Valley since 2014. In early fall, when birds head south for the winter, and again in early spring on their return journey, birds need larger protected areas than the current mix of parks and nature preserves allows.

The big insight was realising "we could use a rent rather than buy model," said Mark Reynolds, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, which pays rice farmers to flood their fields for the few crucial weeks each fall and spring. Rice growers routinely flood their fields for irrigation and to decompose crop residue after harvest; through the conservation programme, named BirdReturns, they do so during periods when the fields would have been dry.

A team of ecologists and economists figured out how much to compensate the farmers for this change. They ran 'reverse auctions' in which landowners specified the lowest payment that would entice them to flood their fields for a given four- to eight-week period. This auction system adjusts payments to farmers' costs. For example, flooding during the end of the spring migration season is trickier to fit into an annual rice-growing schedule, so bids are higher then.

Adjusting to change

Climate change and society's expanding footprint are making this dynamic approach to conservation increasingly useful. "We think this is a big idea," Mark said, adding that it "could really help us with adapting to change." Climate change might alter natural wetlands and when and where birds migrate. BirdReturns can more nimbly adjust to those changes. The team predicts the birds' migratory paths using crowdsourced data from amateur birdwatchers and combines that data with satellite images of surface water, enabling the establishment of temporary wetlands at the right times and places.

The farmers continued to own the land, live on it and grow crops in already cleared areas. In essence, the conservation outfit rented the trees from the landowner, while the owner held on to other land-use rights. Buying up the forest outright and turning it into traditional reserves not only would have cost more, but it would have displaced thousands of people from their homes.

Ideally, less productive farmers will participate in the programme because the food production - and profit - sacrificed by keeping their forest intact is small. That's why proper pricing is important. If you offer an appropriate payment for conservation, the best farmers will decline it because they can earn more by expanding their farms, while the mediocre ones will sign up. Innovative programmes are demonstrating how land can do double duty and competing needs can coexist. With the help of market-based approaches, we can often enlist private land to serve nature's needs.

(The author is an economics professor at Northwestern University, USA)