Gina M. Ralph

Assessing the Cost of Global Biodiversity and Conservation Knowledge

Knowledge products comprise assessments of authoritative information supported by standards, governance, quality control, data, tools, and capacity building mechanisms. Considerable resources are dedicated to developing and maintaining knowledge products for biodiversity conservation, and they are widely used to inform policy and advise decision makers and practitioners. However, the financial cost of delivering this information is largely undocumented. We evaluated the costs and funding sources for developing and maintaining four global biodiversity and conservation knowledge products: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Protected Planet, and the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas. These are secondary data sets, built on primary data collected by extensive networks of expert contributors worldwide. We estimate that US

Shortfalls and solutions for meeting national and global conservation area targets

160 million (range: US

Coherent assessments of Europe’s marine fishes show regional divergence and megafauna loss

116–204 million), plus 293 person-years of volunteer time (range: 278–308 person-years) valued at US

Living on the edge: Vulnerability of coral-dependent fishes in the Gulf

14 million (range US

The status of marine biodiversity in the Eastern Central Atlantic (West and Central Africa)

12–16 million), were invested in these four knowledge products between 1979 and 2013. More than half of this financing was provided through philanthropy, and nearly three-quarters was spent on personnel costs. The estimated annual cost of maintaining data and platforms for three of these knowledge products (excluding the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems for which annual costs were not possible to estimate for 2013) is US

Troubled waters: Threats and extinction risk of the sharks, rays and chimaeras of the Arabian Sea and adjacent waters

6.5 million in total (range: US

The conservation status of marine bony shorefishes of the Greater Caribbean

6.2–6.7 million). We estimated that an additional US

Red List of marine bony fishes of the Eastern Central Atlantic

114 million will be needed to reach pre-defined baselines of data coverage for all the four knowledge products, and that once achieved, annual maintenance costs will be approximately US

Corrigendum: Coherent assessments of Europe's marine fishes show regional divergence and megafauna loss

12 million. These costs are much lower than those to maintain many other, similarly important, global knowledge products. Ensuring that biodiversity and conservation knowledge products are sufficiently up to date, comprehensive and accurate is fundamental to inform decision-making for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Thus, the development and implementation of plans for sustainable long-term financing for them is critical.