Event Information
The next EEU seminar, organized by the department of economics, will be held on Monday the 18th of May at 12:10 – 13:00 in B44.
The seminar will be held by Lassi Ahlvik who will present on the topic of: Misallocation in conservation area networks
Lassi Ahlvik is a professor of environmental economics at the University of Helsinki whose research focuses on climate policy, environmental and resource economics, and the economic impacts of the green transition.
When: Monday, May 18th at 12:10-13:00.
Where: B44
Speaker: Lassi Ahlvik
Online: Zoom
Summary: We present a framework to quantify the misallocation of protected areas and decompose it into cost-efficiency, additionality, and local ecosystem service channels. We calibrate the model using four site-level inputs for Finland: ecological value from the LIFE biodiversity metric, degradation risk from estimated forest-harvest hazard functions, opportunity costs from property transaction data, and the local amenity value of avoided clearcutting, estimated from nearby house and cabin prices. We find that the observed rollout of protected areas is highly inefficient relative to the optimum: the same ecological gains could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost by targeting sites with higher biodiversity value, larger local ecosystem-service benefits, greater degradation risk, and lower opportunity costs. We also use the model to characterize the least-cost path to achieving Finland’s 30by30 conservation target.