Heritage Conservation Through Public Donation in Malaysia: A Potential for Islamic Crowdfunding

Heritage tourism sites are vital to be preserved due to their multiple benefits for society and nation. Nevertheless, over the years, some of these sites have been threatened due to the lack of funds to support conservation costs. While heritage sites need financial aids for their sustainability, the government allocation on this matter may be restricted, as they need to emphasise crucial areas like people welfare and economic development. In this regard, this study aims to explore the applicability of Islamic crowdfunding for heritage conservation in this country. In fact, crowdfunding has been successfully proven its role in supporting community-based projects. Through library research, two models are developed: infaq-based and waqf-based models. Despite this study is considered conceptual, its finding proposes two practical models that can be applied as crowdfunding platforms to support the conservation of heritage tourism sites in Malaysia.

Targeted strategies for the management of wildlife diseases: the case of brucellosis in Alpine ibex

The management of infectious diseases in wildlife reservoirs is challenging and faces several limitations. However, detailed knowledge of host–pathogen systems often reveal heterogeneity among the hosts’ contribution to transmission. Management strategies targeting specific classes of individuals and/or areas, having a particular role in transmission, could be more effective and more acceptable than population-wide interventions. In the wild population of Alpine ibex (Capra ibex—a protected species) of the Bargy massif (French Alps), females transmit brucellosis (Brucella melitensis) infection in ~90% of cases, and most transmissions occur in the central spatial units (“core area”). Therefore, we expanded an individual-based model, developed in a previous study, to test whether strategies targeting females or the core area, or both, would be more effective. We simulated the relative efficacy of realistic strategies for the studied population, combining test-and-remove (euthanasia of captured animals with seropositive test results) and partial culling of unmarked animals. Targeting females or the core area was more effective than untargeted management options, and strategies targeting both were even more effective. Interestingly, the number of ibex euthanized and culled in targeted strategies were lower than in untargeted ones, thus decreasing the conservation costs while increasing the sanitary benefits. Although there was no silver bullet for the management of brucellosis in the studied population, targeted strategies offered a wide range of promising refinements to classical sanitary measures. We therefore encourage to look for heterogeneity in other wildlife diseases and to evaluate potential strategies for improving management in terms of efficacy but also acceptability.

Economics of the Biodiversity Convention

Biological diversity refers to the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and interactions. Biological diversity, or biodiversity for short, is being lost at an unprecedented rate. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species estimates that 25% of mammals, 41% of amphibians, 33% of reef building corals, and 13% of birds are threatened with extinction. These biodiversity benefits are being lost due to conversion of natural habitat, overharvesting, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. The loss of biodiversity is important because it provides many critical resources, services, and ecosystem functions, such as foods, medicines, clean air, and storm protection. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse pose a major risk to human societies and economic welfare. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was established in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio “Earth Summit”) and enacted in 1993. The international treaty aims to conserve biodiversity and ensure the sustainable use of the components of biodiversity and the equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the use of genetic resources. The CBD has near universal global participation with 196 parties signatory to the treaty. The non-legally binding commitments established in 2010 by the CBD are known as the Aichi Targets. They include the goal of conserving at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water habitats and 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020. Biodiversity continues to decline at an unprecedented rate and the world faces “biological annihilation” and a sixth mass extinction event. There are several underlying causes of the continuing loss of biodiversity that need to be addressed. First, the CBD Aichi Targets are not ambitious enough and should be extended to protect as much as 50% of the terrestrial realm for biodiversity. Second, it is difficult to place an economic value on the range of direct, indirect, and nonuse values of biodiversity. The failure to take into account the full economic value of biodiversity in prices, projects, and policy decisions means that biodiversity is often misused and overused. Third, biodiversity is a global public good and displays nonrival and nonexcludable characteristics. Because of this, it is difficult to raise sufficient funds for conservation and to channel these funds to cover local conservation costs. In particular, much of the world’s biodiversity is located in (mainly tropical) developing countries, and they do not have the incentive or the funds to spend the money to “save” enough biodiversity on behalf of the rest of the world. The funding for global biodiversity conservation is $4–$10 billion annually, whereas around $100 billion a year is needed to protect the Earth’s broad range of animal and plant species. This funding gap undermines CBD’s conservation efforts. Governments and international organizations have been unable to raise the investments needed to reverse the decline in biological populations and habitats on land and in oceans. There is an important role for private-sector involvement in the CBD to endorse efforts for more sustainable use of biodiversity and to contribute funds to finance conservation and habitat protection efforts.

Benefit Sharing in Community Based Conservation Programs: The Case of Makao Wildlife Management Area, Tanzania

Wildlife Management Area establishment around protected areas in Tanzania have been faced with various challenges including failures to adequately involve local populations in planning, governance and management of wildlife related resources. This study examined the benefit sharing mechanisms in Community Based Conservation programs, the case of Makao Wildlife Management Area in Meatu District, Tanzania. The study was conducted in Jinamo, Mwabagimu and Makao Villages. Data were collected from 281 heads of households using a survey design within the mixed approach. The study used simple random sampling based on the names of all heads of the households in each study village who were obtained from the village households as registered by village chairs. The major findings indicate that in the past five years, there is a considerable increase of income generated from wildlife investment in the study area which is used for payment of VGS salaries, food and other expense for VGS, community development and sharing among member villages. The study further shows that, inadequate involvement in the WMA activities results in local people having low perception on the WMA accrued benefits. The study recommends that it is essential to involve the local community in the WMA design and management in order to improve its acceptability and ownership. Benefit sharing in the WMAs should be designed as a strategy to offset conservation costs and build support for biodiversity conservation among conservation actors mainly local communities.

Ecological Land Conservation Strategies Explained By Urban Growth and Climate Change

Rising urban population throughout the world have boosted land use demand, intensifying pressure of ecological land resources linked with climate change. By incorporating risk into assessment, people can discourage excessive growth in megacity areas. Here, we propose a generalized analysis framework of ecological land conservation by devising a public goods game, which simultaneously considers population gravity and climate change along with interactions. Our method describes strategic conservation under the growth risk of urban boundary, where recurs across multiple rounds. We find that a compact and reasonable city with spatial structure will reduces erosion risk of ecological land and the lower costs of conservation, and higher its benefits. The conservation costs at the equilibrium do not increase with the degree of emphasis on the future, which show threshold effect. Ecological lands at the city boundaries have highest eroding risk, but rather pay a disproportionate amount of cost in this asymmetric game environment, which makes controlling erosion of ecological land less sustainable. Overall, our results suggest that implementing conservation strategies will efficiently reduce aggregate damages of urban growth and mitigate climate change, otherwise it may increase increases ecological land damages substantially.

Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas: A case study in Sichuan province, China

Identifying priority conservation areas plays a significant role in conserving biodiversity under climate change, but uncertainties create challenges for conservation planning. To reduce uncertainties in the conservation planning framework, we developed an adaptation index to assess the effect of topographic complexity on species adaptation to climate change, which was incorporated into the conservation framework as conservation costs. Meanwhile, the species distributions were predicted by the Maxent model, and the priority conservation areas were optimized during different periods in Sichuan province by the Marxan model. Our results showed that the effect of topographic complexity was critical for species adaptation, but the adaptation index decreased with the temperature increase. Based on the conservation targets and costs, the distributions of priority conservation areas were mainly concentrated in mountainous areas around the Sichuan Basin where may be robust to the adaptation to climate change. In the future, the distributions of priority conservation areas had no evident changes, accounting for about 26% and 28% of the study areas. Moreover, most species habitats could be conserved in terms of conservation targets in these priority conservation areas. Therefore, our approach could achieve biodiversity conservation goals and be highly practical. More importantly, quantifying the effect of topography also is critical for options for planning conservation areas in response to climate change.

High-resolution land value maps reveal underestimation of conservation costs in the United States

The justification and targeting of conservation policy rests on reliable measures of public and private benefits from competing land uses. Advances in Earth system observation and modeling permit the mapping of public ecosystem services at unprecedented scales and resolutions, prompting new proposals for land protection policies and priorities. Data on private benefits from land use are not available at similar scales and resolutions, resulting in a data mismatch with unknown consequences. Here I show that private benefits from land can be quantified at large scales and high resolutions, and that doing so can have important implications for conservation policy models. I developed high-resolution estimates of fair market value of private lands in the contiguous United States by training tree-based ensemble models on 6 million land sales. The resulting estimates predict conservation cost with up to 8.5 times greater accuracy than earlier proxies. Studies using coarser cost proxies underestimate conservation costs, especially at the expensive tail of the distribution. This has led to underestimations of policy budgets by factors of up to 37.5 in recent work. More accurate cost accounting will help policy makers acknowledge the full magnitude of contemporary conservation challenges and can help improve the targeting of public ecosystem service investments.

Sustainable Engineering: Load Transfer Characterization for the Structural Design of Thinner Concrete Pavements

Concrete pavements are characterized by their high durability and low conservation costs. However, concrete production causes large amounts of harmful emissions. In this context, short slab pavements allow us to reduce the slab thickness and the amount of concrete used in their construction. These benefits are only valid if the design assumptions are fulfilled, one of which is the provision of enough Load Transfer Efficiency (LTE) by the aggregate interlock. However, the current design method for short slabs does not relate the LTE with the Crack Width (CW) under the joints. This can jeopardize the sustainable benefits of short slabs. The objective of this study is to propose a method to develop the LTE–CW relationship for the short slabs’ design. The sustainable and accessible approach adopted in the proposal represents a paradigm shift compared to the traditional methods, which are limited to laboratories with sufficient resources to perform real-scale testing. The results show that it is possible to develop the LTE–CW relation in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, the aggregates that fulfill the technical specifications for pavements provide enough LTE when most of the joints are activated. When that happens, short slab pavements reduce environmental and human health impacts by 33% and 26%, respectively.