Gridded Economic Analysis of the Impacts of Global Biodiversity Conservation Policies

Open online seminar with Dr Iman Haqiqi, Lead Research Economist, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Purdue University

About the seminar

Efforts to protect terrestrial ecosystems have gained global momentum, yet policymakers still lack quantitative evidence on how different conservation instruments reshape land use, irrigation, food production, and market outcomes. Existing studies typically treat land protection as a uniform constraint, overlooking how spatially targeted policies alter economic spillovers and the distribution of adjustment costs. This paper introduces a suite of five market-based mechanisms, ranging from global uniform taxes to grid-cell–specific conservation instruments, implemented within a high-resolution gridded economic partial-equilibrium model that allocates land across cropland, pasture, managed forest, and natural areas using region-biome targets. Each scenario enforces a consistent protection goal but varies the spatial precision of policy across biomes, ecoregions, and priority areas.  More targeted taxes and restrictions substantially moderate global food price impacts, yet induce sharper spatial spillovers as production relocates to low-cost, low-yield regions. Uniform taxes achieve the target with smoother global adjustments but impose larger aggregate welfare losses. The comparison reveals a clear efficiency-spillover tradeoff: spatial precision lowers the average cost of conservation policy but increases heterogeneity in local land-use transitions

How to participate

The seminar is open to all.
The seminar will take place online via Zoom