CONSERVATIONISTS are wasting money by running too many of their projects in rich, developed countries. That鈥檚 the message from an analysis that reveals the vast discrepancy between the costs of conservation in different parts of the world.
More than 88 per cent of the $6 billion dollars paid out annually on habitat conservation is spent in the developed world. 鈥淢oney likes to stay close to home,鈥� says M. A. Sanjayan, lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Washington DC. People are more likely to provide money for local projects because they can then see the benefits, he says.
But a study led by Andrew Balmford, a conservation biologist in Britain at the University of Cambridge, shows the money could be better spent elsewhere. His team collected data on the management costs of 139 field-based conservation projects in every continent except Antarctica (see Map). He found the cost of conservation per square kilometre varied from just 7 US cents in the Lena delta nature reserve in the Russian Arctic to a massive $1.37 million to restore the Benninger marsh in Germany. In Brazil, the same area cost from $61 in the Amazon basin to 拢2464 near the capital, Brasilia. 鈥淲hat was staggering was the scale of the variation,鈥� says Balmford.
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Predictably, the general picture from Balmford鈥檚 study is that you get better value for money in poorer countries, where the cost of living is much cheaper than in rich countries. This bodes well for the many biodiversity 鈥渉ot spots鈥� which lie in tropical countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar (New Scientist, 26 February 2000, p 12).
More surprisingly, Balmford鈥檚 analysis also suggests there should be more investment in wilderness areas such as those in Mongolia and Namibia. These regions do not have as many endemic species as the hot spots, but are far cheaper to work in. 鈥淭here are places in the world that are pure wilderness and are very, very cheap right now,鈥� says Sanjayan.
Conservationists typically base decisions about which projects to fund on figures such as the number of threatened species in the region. But Balmford says his study, which will appear in a future issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights how important it is to consider whether a project is good value.
Sanjayan says Balmford鈥檚 work should help conservationists convince people that their money will have a greater impact farther from home. 鈥淚t鈥檚 going to give us good ammunition for persuading people to invest outside the US,鈥� he says.
Funding agencies also need to assess how likely a particular project is to succeed, Sanjayan says, even if this makes the analysis more complicated. Success depends on many factors, including the strength of local laws and the political situation. It may be cheap to do conservation work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, but the instability caused by the civil war there might mean a project has little chance of being completed successfully.