Incentive payment programs that address conservation cost efficiency, social equity, and economic development objectives all together are critical in evaluating optimal spatial targeting of programs’ budgets.

Conservation agencies can use the quantified trade-offs and synergistic relationships among the three objectives to assess the costs (trade-offs) or benefits (synergies) of priorities they place on the objectives.

The results show that optimal budgets are more geographically widespread under the multiple-objective priority scenarios than under the single-objective of maximizing conservation cost efficiency.

Our modeling framework can help conservation agencies adjust their priorities to address other objectives when they view the cost of achieving a single conservation too high in terms of other objectives sacrificed.

The optimal spatial budget distributions under different priority scenarios can be used to spatially target conservation budgets to encourage conservation goals, while also promoting social equity through poverty alleviation and rural economic development through increased economic activity.