How $14 billion protected Earth’s species

Billions of dollars of financial investment in global conservation has significantly reduced biodiversity loss, according to a new UCL study. For twenty-five years, it has been known that more money must be spent on nature conservation to prevent a modern mass extinction as serious as that of the dinosaurs. But governments and donors have been unwilling to source the necessary budgets, often because of little hard evidence that the money spent on conservation does any good, especially in developing countries, where investments can easily go astray. New research has quantified how the $14.4 billion spent on global conservation between the 1992 Earth Summit and 2003 has significantly reduced biodiversity losses.  "Without the big increases in funding driven by the Earth Summit, we would already have lost about a third more biodiversity than we actually did. More money is still needed, but this finding should now encourage decision makers to re-engage with the Earth Summit's positive vision, and adequately bankroll the protection of earth's biodiversity today," explained co-author, Dr David Redding (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). The team analysed biodiversity loss across 109 signatory countries that received the funding between 1996 and 2008 and found that biodiversity loss was reduced by an average 29% per country. They found this by analysing how the relative ranking of species changed in the IUCN Red List over that period, compared to the amount spent on conservation in each country. The IUCN Red List is the world authority on the threat status of species and each species is ranked from 'least concern' to 'extinct'.