Estimate costs, calculate return on investment.

For strat­e­gy selec­tion, the ‘con­ser­va­tion return on invest­ment’ of a strat­e­gy (here­after ROI) is an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion. The con­ser­va­tion ROI esti­mates the con­ser­va­tion ben­e­fit per dol­lar invest­ed (not to be con­fused with the con­ven­tion­al def­i­n­i­tion of ROI as an esti­mate of finan­cial returns). An esti­mate of costs is nec­es­sary to cal­cu­late ROI. Esti­mate the costs of imple­ment­ing each strat­e­gy, and then cal­cu­late ROI by divid­ing the ben­e­fits esti­mat­ed in the pre­vi­ous step by the strat­e­gy’s cost. These ROI esti­mates will be used in the next CbD 2.0 step — Strat­e­gy Selec­tion. When there is a sim­ple min­i­mum goal state­ment with only one clear ele­ment, divide the esti­mat­ed strat­e­gy impact on the met­ric for that ele­ment by the strat­e­gy cost. If there is more than one ele­ment in the min­i­mum goal state­ment (as in the marine exam­ple above), cal­cu­late an ROI for each impact met­ric by divid­ing each impact met­ric by the total strat­e­gy cost.