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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
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From Nature magazine
Protecting all the world's threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year, according to an estimate published today in Science. If that number is not staggering enough, the scientists behind the work also report that effectively conserving the significant areas these species live in could rack up a bill of more than $76 billion a year.
Study leader Stuart Butchart, a conservation scientist at BirdLife International in Cambridge, UK, admits that the numbers seem very large. But “in terms of government budgets, they’re quite trivial”, he says, adding that governments have already committed to taking this action in international treaties — they just did not know how much it would cost.
The researchers also point out that the annual costs of proper conservation are but a fraction of the value of nature's ‘ecosystem services’, such as pollination of crops and carbon sinks, estimated at between $2 trillion and $6 trillion. “These sums are not bills, they’re investments in natural capital,” says Butchart. “They’re dwarfed by the benefits we get back from nature.”
Under the internationally agreed Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), governments have committed to meeting 20 conservation targets by 2020, including improving the conservation status of threatened species. To come up with numbers for how much this might cost, Butchart and his team asked experts on 211 threatened bird species to estimate the cost of lowering the extinction risk for each species by one category on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature .
Costing the Earth
The researchers concluded that improving the status of all the world’s 1,115 threatened bird species would cost between $875 million and $1.23 billion a year for the next decade. Adding in other animals raises the number to between $3.41 billion and $4.76 billion a year.
Another target of the CBD is to protect 17% of the Earth’s land surface. Estimates for this are harder to make, but by extrapolating from known land prices and management costs Butchart and his team put the number at $76.1 billion a year.
Exactly how much is now being spent to meet the convention’s targets is unclear, but spending will need to increase by “at least an order of magnitude”, Butchart says. And although there is a large amount of uncertainty in these numbers, governments can still use them to begin planning ways to meet the targets they have already agreed to.
Henrique Pereira, who works on international conservation issues at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, says that although there are uncertainties inherent in extrapolating from birds to all species, the work is an “extremely smart paper”.
“For the first time we have an estimate of how much these targets will cost,” he says. “For any negotiations that occur over the next few years [on CBD targets], these numbers can be used as a reference.”
But Pereira also points out that the figure is for just two of the 20 targets agreed by the CBD. “If you look at the range of targets for 2020, the total bill will be higher,” he says.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on October 12, 2012.
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12 Comments
Add CommentProbably the bill can be lowered by a stewardship program, by employing local people as stewards of their closer environment. We can also channel the money coming from environmentally friendly labels into projects researching alternative substances that substitute endangered species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat else are we going to do with the thousands of "bird counters" our universities and colleges are producing today?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this76 billion dollars should keep them employed for awhile but what will it do for our productivity levels. If we don't produce... how can we help nature or ourselves? GK
Hey if America taxed churches like other business in the US than we would have that whole 76 million in about 1 year. Maybe in the second year we could feed the world...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe usual crotchety cane-waving from the usual gum-flapper.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem isn't just serious, it's dangerous. The diversity reduction has been on the march for centuries - it's now reaching a stage where species loss is outpacing variation loss.
Zoos are failing as 'arks' because of budgets.
$76Bn would be staggering in prosperous times: it's a non-starter inside the Great Recession. It's not even triage time because the choices aren't always ours to make. The money simply won't be there.
Garbage Dump Earth ... coming to a planet near you soon.
$76 Bn is actually pretty trivial if we simply realize that its pointless to spend money on things like defense if failing to redirect a tiny portion of it to conservation results in a barren and impoverished Earth, which will not provide adequately for people and thus everyone will be MUCH less secure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe US alone could afford this bill, but luckily even if we just divide it up amongst the 1st World nations it becomes quite trivial very fast.
How about the economic benefit of saving biodiversity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"if we simply realize that its pointless to spend money on things like defense"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you from some other planet?
Statements like those are exactly the way to attract a heap ivory tower polyanna insults at protecting biodiversity.
Better read it and understand it - there is no $76Bn available anywhere from anyone. The world is piled up in deficit and debt crises, and the war drums are louder, not softer.
The question is not even the number itself, representing something that really is not availlable. It is right to talk about the absurdity of money spent in defense. why the United States don't think it over? The amount of money directed to war, tells everybody the kind of nation americans choose to be in. Why americans think they are responsible for some nations trying to build nuclear weapons, and make no restrictions about others? Americans are antecipatting things and causing war by that simple preventive gesture. If american really is great, as I myself think it is, it should take distance from what nations choose to do, and just live more accomodated with what really matters for its population. War doesn't give americans much credit to deserve the respect from the rest of the world, as it could and would if their governants start living without so much anxiety about what could happen if... The strong almost don't make use of these renegating kind of life! Preserving the biodiversity would be the best way to start it over, giving to the world a great example of what a strong nation is nowadays. But at the world meetings direct to this events recently, the United States has always built the opposite image.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGiven how important this is 76 billion is trivial considering our global economy is some 69 trillion. That's all it takes to keep our ecosystems healthy? Jeez, why the hell aren't we doing it already?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisG. Karst says 'If we don't produce... how can we help nature or ourselves?'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI assume that you are assuming that protecting other species means not producing anything for ourselves, that we have some dualistic either / or choice.
(I think the article sadly doesn't make it clear whether that's what they mean.)
But life doesn't have to be simplistically dualistic. If we choose sustainable methods of growing food or making things then we can do both: produce what we need (not necessarily any rubbish that we just want because our lives are empty of meaning) and at the same time leave space for other species.
Two examples.
On food, agroforestry or other forms of permaculture / agroecology could allow us to grow food within ecosytems which also sustain other living things. We need more research into these so we can improve what we do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroecology
When it comes to making things, we could do more research and development to follow the principles described by Michael Braungart and William McDonough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_Cradle:_Remaking_the_Way_We_Make_Things
But the crucial thing we need to grasp is that if we trash the Earth's ecosystems then we will trash human civilisation. Other living things could exist without us. We cannot exist without other living things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_services
Destroying them is not just immoral, it's stupid.
Protecting other living beings means also protecting ourselves. It's the ethical thing to do, and it's in our own best interests.
It might help us to remember that money isn't real, in the way that we are real, or other living beings are real.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMoney has only a metaphysical reality, because most of us believe in it.
In discussions like this it therefore helps to think of what that money actually represents. If we choose to conserve other living beings, what will that mean in terms of what we'll actually do differently?
If it means we'll grow food differently, or produce other things differently, that may be an easier thing to envisage than spending whatever amount of millions of billions of pounds or dollars.
Real wealth is the life on this Earth, the energy coming in from the sun, and all the embodied energy that human beings have put into the Earth in the past to produce our infrastructure such as buildings, railways, roads, and utilities such as water supply, sewage treatment, telecommunications, energy supplies, and farms.
Wealth is also in all the good institutions we've made such as good governments, schools, universities and colleges, public libraries, shops and markets, museums, galleries, sports centres, gardens, music, and other works of art.
And of course wealth is also in all the knowledge and skills which people have learned and recorded over the centuries.
Wealth is also in the 'social capital' of good relationships between living people, the trust which people have in each other, and in all the huge energy which people have if only they have the opportunity to do good useful work.
Those things, all that wealth, still exists, as long as war (military or economic) doesn't destroy it.
So when people claim that there is no money to sort out some problem ot other, I just don't believe them. We're in the middle of a big financial crisis, yes. But the real wealth hasn't been destroyed, at least in the USA or Europe, at least not yet.
Of course real wealth - both physical and social capital - has ben destroyed in war-torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
And economic war is destroying real wealth in some countries in Europe such as Greece and Spain, where people are being made homeless and starving because of the cuts imposed by the financially powerful people in organisations like the International Monetary Fund.
But we could choose not to wage military or economic war. We could choose instead to do good with the wealth we've got.
Nice essay, pretty words. However, it doesn't get around the fact, that warmer climates increase biodiversity and protracted cooling devastates it. Likewise for CO2 atmos concentration. Carbon increases available food for all life and enables biodiversity. Prolonged levels below 200 ppm extinguishes it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want increased life, then you should be campaigning for additional carbon releases. It is the stuff of life as the various geological records clearly demonstrate.
With no warming detectable for the last 16 years (HadCRUT4), CO2 has been an innocent bystander for more than half a climate period. It is time to focus better on some of the more important issues, you mention. We will have to do so without a validated model - thanks to the misdirection of "consensus" validation.
We are all on the same planet and we are all concerned about possible futures. GK