Cost of conserving global biodiversity named

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 .