Following the money: do conservation expenditures match priorities?

Conservationists have placed strong emphasis in recent years on prioritizing where efforts should be directed. This makes sense - money is limited and certain places are higher priority than others for conservation, so we should spend wisely.

Yet for all this concern about setting priorities, little accounting has been done on a large-scale to see how conservation dollars are actually being spent.  A new study in the journal Conservation Letters helps advance our understanding of this issue.

Dan Brockington and Katherine Scholfield from the University of Manchester counted up the expenditures by 281 conservation NGOs working in Sub-Saharan Africa from 2004 - 2006. They found both causes of concern and signs of encouragement.

Overall expenditures in the region were highly unequal with just 5 organizations accounting for more than half of the $200 million spent. The geographical distribution of funding was also uneven with much more spent in the south and east of the continent.

On the postive side, the overall expenditures at the country-level correlated with estimates of species richness and threat, which are variables typically used in prioritization approaches.

This contrasts with past research finding that global conservation expenditures matched up weakly with priority levels. The researchers note, however, that correlation does not necessarily equate causation and other factors may be at play in their study.

One potentially confounding issue is that the amount of money spent in a country may affect our knowledge of species richness and threats, and so conservation expenditures could to some extent be driving the indices of prioritization.

Also, conservation priorities and expenditures may vary widely within countries, so a finer-scale analysis might paint a different picture (or not). Finer-scale analysis will also likely be more useful to organizations and help move the dialogue from the realm of diagnosis to prescription.

Clearly, much more research is needed to broaden our understanding of this critically important topic.

In terms of future research, the study authors' note that more focus is needed not just on the level of expenditures but also on the corresponding costs of doing conservation work in different areas. Spending a $1 million on conservation means different things in countries with sharply contrasting costs of doing business.

--Reviewed by Rob Goldstein

Brockington, D., & Scholfield, K. (2010). Expenditure by conservation nongovernmental organizations in sub-Saharan Africa Conservation Letters DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2010.00094.x