Natural Resource Management & Conservation

Balancing the Needs of Nature and People

Inadequate economic opportunity and continued damage from legacy developments continue to be formidable obstacles to wildlife protection and conservation management. Even in countries with established conservation mechanisms, development is increasingly accompanied by encroachment into reserves, protected areas, and national parks. Because emerging markets feel these pressures most intensely, we focus our consulting efforts in these geographies. The impetus for our work is two-fold. Firstly, emerging markets contain some of the last bastions of biodiversity and thus offer the greatest opportunities for positive impact. Secondly, these solutions require a degree of specialized land- and coastline-planning expertise, which we possess.

We apply three “logics” in our approach to conservation areas: economic to maximize income to nearby communities, ecological to maintain the robustness of biological systems, and social-cultural to maintain the resilience of social and cultural systems. We use quantitative methods to determine the sustainable carrying capacity of ecosystems, and we pursue development that does not overwhelm nature’s capacity, that accounts for externalities, and that reinvests rents into furthering an agenda of sustainability.