Dear participants,

Welcome to the online discussion forum on invasive alien species.
Please find welcome note, as attached.
Junko

Junko Shimura
Programme Management Officer IAS/Taxonomy
Secretariat of the CBD

Welcome to the Discussion Forum on the Costs and Benefits of IAS Management.  I will be acting as your moderator for these discussions throughout May and look forward to working with you all.

To get things moving, I have suggested five headings for our discussions and set up separate threads for each, with a brief introductory piece of text to provide context.

• What do we mean by cost-benefit?
• How can we classify the costs and benefits associated with IAS management?
• Examples of the use of cost and benefit analysis to support IAS management.
• What decisions are based on the analysis of management costs and benefits?
• Measurement and availability of data to support the analysis of the costs and benefits of IAS management

Please feel free to post messages and information in these streams or in the general discussion area.  We can also create new streams if needed, so please send in suggestions for further questions for consideration.

I look forward to working with you all and for a stimulating discussion.

Pete Robertson

Hi Pete

In Australia where we have been undertaking successful environmental IAS management for more then 70 years we no longer explicitly apply a classic cost-benefit approach because of the difficulty of valuing the $ benefits to environmental assets for most activities. We have therefore moved to "cost-effectiveness analysis" which looks at collective assessment of the relative effectiveness of a range of different actions at achieving the desired environmental outcome. We have found this much more effective in community co-development and costing of management plans around specific SMART management goals. I attach an early example. 

Andy

Thanks Andy

Thats really useful and good to flag the paper by Carwadine as an exemplar of the use of a cost-effectiveness approach.  In the UK we have similar issues, with the need to assess large number of species and management scenarios when there is little prospect of producing the detailed financial information needed for more traditional cost-benefit analyses.  As you say, in many cases the benefits we hope to achieve are environmental rather than simply economic and a wider process of assessment is needed.

In the UK we had been applying a multi-criteria approach to risk management, alongside the existing risk assessment process, to prioritise newly arrived species for eradication, paper attached. Like your example, this was also based on expert elicitation.

We have purposely kept the remit of this workshop wide to include a range of approaches to assessing costs and benefits, effectiveness and feasibility, so it would be great to hear of more examples and practices

Best Wishes

Pete

Thanks Pete

As you know there are many systems for evaluating risks of over the horizon IAS threats and new arrivals for prioritization for response many of which are glorified semi-quantitative scoring systems and not real risk assessments but offer practical solutions when faced with long lists (including Australia's WRA approach for plants). But we need better quantitative systems for prioritised targets 

If we are going to broaden the discussion out I suggest separate sections on IAS prioritization processes (based on RAs)both pre and post border. Australia runs such processes nationally for both situations.

Under feasibility, once we have an impact-based prioritized list post border, we analyse for feasibility and likelihood of success of different management options across the prioritized list to plan management responses. So analyzing feasibility could be another section.

Cheers

Andy

Dear all participants,

Thank you for your active participation. Secretariat is pleased that first two weeks were filled with numbers of informative posting and discussion. We trust that everyone became familiar to the interface of the Forum, and to gear up the work to feed into the AHTEG process the Secretariat and your moderators (listed below) prepared an additional guidance, as attached.

Kindly read the attached file for further enhanced exchange of views with tangible information. It contains a form to be attached for each of information you will post.

We wish your continuing collaboration in all sessions.

Kind regards,

Junko Shimura, SCBD
and
the moderators:

Peter Robertson (Cost and benefit analysis session)
Christine Villegas (minimizing risk of e-commerce)
Shyama Pagad (management under climate change and others)
Andy Sheppard (Risk analysis on the potential consequences on social, economic and cultural values)

Linked to the new guidance described in Junko's message, I have prepared a summary of the discussions during the first ten days of this forum in the attached document.  I hope this captures the main points of discussion and the examples provided related to the assessment of costs and benefits.
Thank you all for you contributions and I look forward to reading what comes next.
Kind Regards
Pete

This forum has now been running for a month, and this brings the discussion of costs and benefits to a close.  I attach an updated summary of the discussions which I hope catches the key points and evidence provided by you all.  Can I offer everyone my thanks for their contributions and discussions and best wishes for the future.
Pete Robertson