Abstract:
It is vital to understand the consequences of actions
intended to ensure biological conservation. Counterfactual
thinking is increasingly used to establish the difference
between the results of conservation action and the
outcome if no action had been taken. In essence, a counterfactual
is the outcome had a conservation action or
treatment not been applied. The impact of a treatment is
the difference that it makes to intended (or unintended)
outcomes, relative to a counterfactual condition (Ferraro
& Hanauer, 2015; Pressey, Visconti, & Ferraro, 2015).
Since the use of counterfactual thinking is increasing
steadily in conservation impact evaluation, we outline
here five potential challenges to the rigorous application
of the approach, which mainly stem from a failure to recognize
that there may be multiple counterfactual states
and that their construction requires care and transparency
to ensure reproducibility.
