Everyone is in favour of preventing extinctions and the job of the conservation ecologist is to specify how to achieve this scientific goal. That scientific job leads into a maelstrom of problems that have been discussed extensively in the literature. I want to concentrate today on the related question of how much funding is needed and available for conservation and how it can be used most efficiently. The literature on these aspects of conservation action is extensive and I discuss here only a small part of the problems and approaches.
Funding for scientific research has always been limited and in a democratic society would improve only if public interest in research becomes stronger. This is now happening, but the governments of western countries are pulled in many directions for funding and the ecological data needed for protecting threatened and endangered species and ecosystems cannot be obtained by voluntary citizen science, valuable though it is. One of the funding success stories from the United States has been the enactment of the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 (Duda et al. 2022). Wildlife conservation in the USA has been supported by a tax on the purchases of guns and ammunition by hunters and those funds were given to each state to support wildlife conservation. But the number of hunters has declined in the USA although the sales of lethal weapons continue to increase. Sport shooters who are not hunters now provide about half of these tax dollars for conservation, and there has been a move to broaden the tax base to more outdoor activities.
Philanthropic funding has contributed greatly to increased funding for conservation work, but these funds are often country-specific (Yang et al. 2024), and while they benefit wealthy countries, they are sparse in the poorer countries with high species richness and where conservation is even more essential. Yang et al. (2024) discuss the rising philanthropic funding for biodiversity conservation in China while recognizing that while conservation funding is rising it represents <1% of all the philanthropic funding in China. While there is a massive amount of philanthropy that contributes to medical science, there is a strong need for philanthropic funding to increase in all the wealthy countries. Kedward et al. (2023) discuss why private funding alone will not be able to deliver positive achievements for conservation goals. They point out that conservation funding is approximately 5-7 times lower than is needed to reverse biodiversity losses, which argues for direct public funding of conservation by governments. Private investors wish to have some financial return for their investments which can lead to perverse incentives and “greenwashing” with no positive results for biodiversity conservation.
A further concern is that conservation research requires a long-term investment combined with a high tolerance for uncertainty. Given that we can achieve both private and governmental funding for conservation, we find two critical decisions – what species do we focus on since we cannot do all species, and what scale must be achieved to stop biodiversity loss. It is no surprise to conservation ecologists that both taxonomic and aesthetic biases extend throughout biodiversity research. Adamo et al. (2020) compiled for the European Union the funding for plants and animals with the EU over the last 3 decades. They found that animal species obtained three times more funding than plant species. This large-scale approach turned up an array of surprises. In plants for example, species found at northern latitudes with broad distributions and with blue flowers obtained more funding regardless of whether or not they were in danger of extinction.
The species ecologists are attracted to are obvious to any naturalist. We are concerned more about elephants than small rodents. We worry more about sequoias than we do about algae.
The scale question in biodiversity research is the second major issue. Protected areas like National Parks are a key component of safeguarding biodiversity, and setting aside these protected areas is a major effort in conservation. But when one looks at the global scale and compile only those protected areas that are properly resourced with adequate staff and a sufficient budget, Coad et al. (2019) found that only 4-9% of terrestrial amphibians, birds, and mammals are adequately represented in protected areas. Hebblewhite et al. (2022) evaluated the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) large-landscape conservation achievements since its establishment in 1993. The focal species of this large region was the grizzly bear, an umbrella species for this large area of 1.3 million sq. km in western North America. During the last 25 years the amount of protected area in this particular landscape grew by 8%, achieving a total of 18% of the landscape in national parks and reserves, a major conservation success. This program is a clear success but not yet achieving the 30% proposed by the Global Biodiversity Framework of 2022 (Saunders et al. 2023).
The scale issue is critical at small scales as well, and the critical point is that detailed small scale research efforts are essential for conserving the biodiversity in all protected areas. Most conservation research is at small scale with a limited budget and working on a limited area with a time frame of 3 years. Yet the purpose of many research grants is to achieve results that will flow through into policy at the government level. LeFlore et al. (2022) evaluated how many small-scale studies in the flora and fauna of coastal marine environments were utilized in policy actions. They found that only 40% of these marine studies were reported to result in a positive outcome for conservation. Specific reliable scientific data are a prerequisite to defining action plans for conservation but there needs to be more interaction between government policy makers and scientists collecting relevant data. Reliable data are necessary for proper conservation policy actions but not sufficient.
Adamo, M., Sousa, R., Wipf, S., Correia, R.A., Lumia, A., Mucciarelli, M. & Mammola, S. (2022) Dimension and impact of biases in funding for species and habitat conservation. Biological Conservation, 272, e109636.doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109636.
Coad, L., Watson, J.E.M., Geldman, J., Burgess, N.D., Leverington, F., Hockings, M., Knights, K. & Di Marco, M. (2019) Widespread shortfalls in protected area resourcing undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17, 259-264.doi: 10.1002/fee.2042.
Duda, M.D., Beppler, T., Austen, D.J. & Organ, J.F. (2022) The precarious position of wildlife conservation funding in the United States. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 27, 164-172.doi: 10.1080/10871209.2021.1904307.
Hebblewhite, M., Hilty, J.A., Williams, S., Locke, H., Chester, C., Johns, D., Kehm, G. & Francis, W.L. (2022) Can a large-landscape conservation vision contribute to achieving biodiversity targets? Conservation Science and Practice, 4, e588.doi: 10.1111/csp2.588.
Kedward, K., Ermgassen, S.z., Ryan-Collins, J. & Wunder, S. (2023) Heavy reliance on private finance alone will not deliver conservation goals. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 1339-1342.doi: 10.1038/s41559-023-02098-6.
LeFlore, M., Bunn, D., Sebastian, P. & Gaydos, J.K. (2022) Improving the probability that small‐scale science will benefit conservation. Conservation Science and Practice, 4, e571.doi: 10.1111/csp2.571.
Saunders, S.P., Saunders, S.P., Grand, J., & Price, J. (2023). Integrating climate‐change refugia into 30 by 30 conservation planning in North America. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 21(2): 77-84. doi:10.1002/fee.2592.
Yang, F., Tao, Z. & Zhang, L. (2024) Trends and dynamics of philanthropic funding for biodiversity conservation in China. Conservation Science and Practice, 6, e13059.doi: 10.1111/csp2.13059.