Graeme M. Buchanan

Financial Costs of Meeting Global Biodiversity Conservation Targets: Current Spending and Unmet Needs

Costs of Conservation In 2010, world governments agreed to a strategic plan for biodiversity conservation, including 20 targets to be met by 2020, through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Discussions on financing the plan have still not been resolved, partly because there is little information on the likely costs of meeting the targets. McCarthy et al. (p. 946, published online 11 October) estimate the financial costs for two of the targets relating to protected areas and preventing extinctions. Using data from birds, they develop models that can be extrapolated to the costs for biodiversity more broadly. Reducing extinction risk for all species is estimated to require in the region of U.S.

Delivering a global, terrestrial, biodiversity observation system through remote sensing.

4 billion annually, while the projected costs of establishing and maintaining protected areas may be as much as U.S.

Identifying Priority Areas for Conservation: A Global Assessment for Forest-Dependent Birds

58 billion—although both sums are small, relative to the economic costs of ecosystem losses. Data for birds and protected area requirements yield estimated costs for maintaining worldwide diversity targets. World governments have committed to halting human-induced extinctions and safeguarding important sites for biodiversity by 2020, but the financial costs of meeting these targets are largely unknown. We estimate the cost of reducing the extinction risk of all globally threatened bird species (by ≥1 International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List category) to be U.S.

Linked indicator sets for addressing biodiversity loss

0.875 to

Protection Reduces Loss of Natural Land-Cover at Sites of Conservation Importance across Africa

1.23 billion annually over the next decade, of which 12% is currently funded. Incorporating threatened nonavian species increases this total to U.S.

Open-source mapping and services for Web-based land-cover validation

3.41 to

An assessment of land cover and threats in Important Bird Areas in Africa.

4.76 billion annually. We estimate that protecting and effectively managing all terrestrial sites of global avian conservation significance (11,731 Important Bird Areas) would cost U.S.

Exploring the relationships between wader declines and current land-use in the British uplands

65.1 billion annually. Adding sites for other taxa increases this to U.S.

Drivers of extinction risk in African mammals: the interplay of distribution state, human pressure, conservation response and species biology

76.1 billion annually. Meeting these targets will require conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.

Rapid declines in habitat quality and population size of the Liben (Sidamo) Lark Heteromirafra sidamoensis necessitate immediate conservation action

Land-cover change is of major concern to conservationists because of its generally negative impact on biodiversity (Brooks et al. 2002). There is a clear need to track these changes, and such information could make a major contribution to a global biodiversity observation system. Monitoring of biodiversity is an essential component of conservation because it allows problems to be identified, priorities to be set, solutions to be developed, and resources to be targeted (Balmford et al. 2003). Monitoring also allows assessments of progress toward targets and indicators in unilateral and international conservation-policy instruments (e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity [CDB]), of the impacts of international conservation policy (Donald et al. 2007), and of other policy sectors (Donald et al. 2001). Nevertheless, a paucity of information has led to a poor understanding of the cost-effectiveness of conservation policies (Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006), exposing them to criticism (Stokstad 2005). The overwhelming majority of species and ecosystems receive no systematic monitoring, and there is a conspicuous mismatch between the distribution of monitoring effort and the distribution of terrestrial biodiversity at a global scale (Green et al. 2005). The need to improve monitoring is widely recognized (Balmford et al. 2003; Pereira and Cooper 2006), and although some systematic monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity for conservation is undertaken locally in the developing world (e.g., Danielsen et al. 2008), there is no protocol to tackle the issue at a global scale. Traditionally, monitoring of popu-