Nature’s ledger : accounting for decision criteria in conservation finance (2015-2025)

Abstract

Conservation agencies must allocate scarce resources across competing ecological priorities, yet the criteria guiding these decisions are unevenly documented and often only implicitly justified. This systematized review synthesizes peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025 to identify the decision criteria used in conservation funding and prioritization frameworks. Searches conducted in Scopus and ScienceDirect, supplemented with AI-assisted retrieval, produced 104 records; after PRISMA screening, 32 studies were included in the final analysis. Three criteria families dominated the evidence base: ecological benefit, financial cost, and feasibility. These were operationalized through cost-effectiveness ratios, return-on-investment metrics, feasibility-adjusted benefit scores, and spatial optimization approaches. While a subset of studies incorporated ecosystem services, climate resilience, or species risk, few formalized social or governance dimensions such as equity, indigenous rights, or community-defined outcomes. This omission reveals a persistent transparency gap, as valueladen judgments continue to shape prioritization without being explicitly represented in models. The corpus also exhibited a strong geographic skew toward Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Despite a decade of global commitments emphasizing justice, resilience, and inclusive governance, conservation funding frameworks remain anchored in a narrow technical triad. Future tools must make value choices explicit and broaden criteria sets to better align funding decisions with contemporary conservation goals.