Conservation triage or injurious neglect in endangered species recovery

Abstract

Listing endangered and threatened species under the US Endangered Species Act is presumed to offer a defense against extinction and a solution to achieve recovery of imperiled populations, but only if effective conservation action ensues after listing occurs. The amount of government funding available for species protection and recovery is one of the best predictors of successful recovery; however, government spending is both insufficient and highly disproportionate among groups of species, and there is significant discrepancy between proposed and actualized budgets across species. In light of an increasing list of imperiled species requiring evaluation and protection, an explicit approach to allocating recovery funds is urgently needed. Here I provide a formal decision-theoretic approach focusing on return on investment as an objective and a transparent mechanism to achieve the desired recovery goals. I found that less than 25% of the $1.21 billion/year needed for implementing recovery plans for 1,125 species is actually allocated to recovery. Spending in excess of the recommended recovery budget does not necessarily translate into better conservation outcomes. Rather, elimination of only the budget surplus for "costly yet futile" recovery plans can provide sufficient funding to erase funding deficits for more than 180 species. Triage by budget compression provides better funding for a larger sample of species, and a larger sample of adequately funded recovery plans should produce better outcomes even if by chance. Sharpening our focus on deliberate decision making offers the potential to achieve desired outcomes in avoiding extinction for Endangered Species Act-listed species.

Keywords: conservation prioritization; conservation triage; cost; endangered species; return on investment.

Fig. 1.

Frequency of ESA-listed species showing the relationship between their status (declining or increasing) and proportion of proposed funding that the species has received for recovery (deficit, less than proposed by the recovery team; surplus, more than proposed by the recovery team). The two are negatively correlated; funding influences the relative frequency of success (i.e., increasing population) or failure (i.e., decreasing population) with greater relative success with more funding (Kendall rank correlation, T = 0.05, z = 1.39, n = 84, P = 0.049).

Fig. 2.

Framework for conservation triage. Shown is the index of recovery as a function of the proportion of the proposed budget actually allocated and spent on conservation for all species with conservation plans (black points). The index of recovery is the sum of years in which the population increases (+1), decreases (−1), or remains constant (0). Blue numbers represent species experiencing injurious neglect (SI Appendix, Table S1), and red numbers show species with recovery efforts that cost more than the budget proposed in their recovery plan (SI Appendix, Table S2). By increasing expenditures for injurious neglect species (blue numbers) and reducing expenditures for costly failure species (red numbers), recovery funding objectives are met for 182 species.

Fig. 3.

Cumulative number of species categorized as injurious neglect (spending for recovery less than the budget recommended for recovery) whose project spending can be improved (spending equal to or greater than budget) by triaging the top 50 species in the “futile” category (where spending is greater than budget but the species has declined more than increased over the last decade). The horizontal red line is the fixed, inflation-adjusted cost of deliberate budget compression for 50 overfunded futile species. Species on the x-axis are rank-ordered by cost efficacy (from low to high spending deficits). Triage can provide funding for up to 182 species (intersection of two lines). The y-axis (cost) is on a log scale; the fixed cost of triage is ∼$17 million/year. The mean (1 SE) deficit in spending for species converted from injurious neglect to adequate is 93.5K (86.7K).

Fig. 4.

Realized funding (expressed as a proportion of proposed budget) as a function of recovery status. Species with a positive status are depicted by solid blue boxes and declining species are open boxes. The light-blue lines represent median funding levels of species with plans that are on average stable or increasing and plans that are on average increasing during a majority of years (0.27 and 0.41 of the proposed budget, respectively). The pink line represents the median funding level of all declining species plans (status −9 to −11) except those with funding levels >1.