Financial costs of “saving” globally threatened species and safeguarding important sites for biodiversity: Are current needs being met?

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• Donal McCarthy (BirdLife International & RSPB)
• Thursday 27 September 2012, 13:00-14:00
• Judge Business School, Lecture Theatre 3.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Rosamunde Almond.

Under the Strategic Plan for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), world governments have committed to halting human-induced extinctions and safeguarding important sites for biodiversity by 2020. However, inadequate information on the scale of both current (baseline) spending on biodiversity conservation and unmet needs is seen as a major impediment to securing the necessary mobilization of financial resources.

This project, led by BirdLife International/RSPB and supported by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) Collaborative Fund, aimed to address this gap by assessing the costs of delivering two key and urgent components of the Strategic Plan. Using data for birds we assessed, for the first time, the costs of preventing extinctions (i.e. improving the conservation status of globally threatened species) and safeguarding (i.e. protecting and managing) a global network of key sites for biodiversity.

Our results should inform upcoming financing negotiations at the CBD COP in Hyderabad, India, on the magnitude of the financing needs for implementing the Strategic Plan. Improving the conservation status of globally threatened species and protecting important sites for biodiversity is not cheap: a significant increase in the level of resources currently dedicated to conservation is urgently required if we are to meet these targets by 2020. Nevertheless, the total costs are trivial in comparison to expenditure on other government “priorities” and compared to the value of global biodiversity in terms of sustaining human wellbeing.

Please note that no food and drink can be consumed in this Seminar Hall.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative seminar series series.

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• Cambridge Public Policy Events
• Judge Business School, Lecture Theatre 3

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