Confronting Uncertainty and Missing Values in Species Conservation Investment with Environmental Value Transfer

An important category of conservation benefits are non-use (or passive) values that are time-consuming and costly to quantify using direct surveys. In the absence of estimates of these values, there will likely be an underinvestment in conservation actions that generate substantial non-use benefits, such as species and biodiversity conservation. To improve conservation investment decision making, this paper explains why, when and how to use environmental value transfer (EVT) to derive indirect estimates of non-use value while accounting for the uncertainty associated with transferring values from one site to another. Key words: environmental value transfer, uncertainty, transfer error, species conservation, non-use values