Money, it’s said, makes the world go round. The old adage appears to be true in conservation, too: A paper in Nature tracked $14.4 billion spent on conservation programs over a 12-year period around the world, and found that it was money well spent. “All the money we have been spending on conservation has actually made a difference,” says Anthony Waldron, lead author of the paper and research fellow at the National University of Singapore. To understand if spending was effectively making a difference in conservation, the authors compiled a dataset that took into account both species decline and conservation funding per capita in 109 countries. The researchers also looked at how development – population growth, industrial expansion, and agriculture – contributed to biodiversity loss. The model found that while development and GDP growth affected biodiversity negatively, money spent on conservation greatly reduced those impacts. In the 109 countries studied, all of them signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the researchers found a median average reduction of 29 percent of species loss per country as a result of the billions spent in the period from 1996 to 2008. “If we hadn’t spent the money, we would have lost a third more biodiversity than we did,” Waldron tells wildlife.org. The researchers also found that nearly two-thirds of global biodiversity loss during that period was concentrated in just seven countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, India, Australia and the United States (the latter…
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South Africa Today – Environment
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