After the big banks, mortgage brokerage houses, insurance companies, automobile manufacturers and others, it was inevitable that we too consider joining the bailout queue. One caller is Jaboury Ghazoul, of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, who has an entertaining letter in the Science issue of 23 January 2009 (Bailing out creatures great and small, 323:460). Under the premise that the human development process has borrowed non-stop from ecosystems ever since our footprint became larger than nature’s ability to regularly rub it off, this would be a timely occasion to cash in. Here’s the rationale: if Hank Paulson’s $700 billion program had gone to the 10 million or so living species, each would be entitled to $70,000. Given that species do not live in isolation, and that most are threatened because of habitat loss (check it in www.redlist.org), they could collaboratively pool their resources to secure quite a lot of vital expanses of land and oceans in perpetuity. Wrapping up the letter with a shrewd advice that might have come from a hedge fund manager, “The roughly 7.5 million species [doing fine in nature] could bank their collective $525 billion.., [generating interest that] could subsidize species with greater financial and conservation needs”.
 
Is Ghazoul pulling our legs? Given the sad state of the world – the natural, the social and the financial – the satirist’s intent doesn’t really matter if only he can make us think harder about the problem. Indeed, $700 billion is no longer a whole lot of dough – not these days, anyway- particularly if we consider spreading it out over the course of many years. Conversely, conservation scientists are often uncomfortable with their figures indicating, for example, that the cost of protected areas worldwide could amount to – hold your breath – a whooping $5 billion/year! In order to make these figures more palatable, in desperation conservationists sometimes resort to awkward comparisons, like the amount of money spent on soft drinks annually (around $72 billion). Given that we are talking about price tags to conserve life on the planet rather than cleaning the toxic assets in corporate balance sheets, perhaps we are not selling our message nearly as well as the bankers….
 
Ghazoul’s thought experiment helps put these figures into perspective and implies that the task ahead may be made more explicit. In other words, instead of investing in land and oceans that may or may not encompass the home of threatened species, looking at the species themselves is a good indication whether money is going in the right direction. But I say this is a thought experiment rather than a road map because we don’t even have names for roughly 8.4 out of the 10 million species thought to be out there, let alone know where they are and what to do about them. For the other 1.6 million species we do have names, this is essentially all we know about most of them.
 
Will this uncertainty detain us? Of course not. The IUCN Red List Program is managing information on a global scale for about 45,000 species – and growing. For 25,000 of these adequate data exists to assess their status in nature, and to determine if conservation action is required. As of the 2008 assessment, 16,928 were considered threatened, representing 1% of all described species. If we apply Ghazoul’s allocation of $70,000 per species, for a mere $1.2 billion we could likely make a huge difference for threatened biodiversity globally. In the process, we would be conserving countless other species, both named and unnamed.
 
Is this figure too far off the realm of possibilities? Not really. The GEF is the financial mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity and regularly receives guidance from the CBD parties on how to prioritize its investments across the many objectives of the convention. The 9th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 9) to the CBD was held at in Bonn, Germany in May 2008. COP 9 reaffirmed the existing GEF biodiversity strategy, and adopted a resource mobilization strategy designed “...to substantially enhance international financial flows and domestic funding for biological diversity in order to achieve a substantial reduction of the current funding gaps in support of the effective implementation of the Convention's three objectives and the 2010 target”. In addition to asking developed countries for a robust replenishment of the GEF, scheduled to be completed by June 2010, the parties called the GEF to invest in outcomes that would ensure that “the conservation status of threatened species is improved”.
 
So, here’s the opportunity. After its pilot phase, the resources allocated to the GEF for biodiversity have remained flat through successive replenishments. For the ongoing GEF-4 cycle, biodiversity was endowed with $1.1 billion, to be spent over the course of four years, ending in June 2010. If donors agree to double or even triple this figure – a portion of this allocation could be destined to a dedicated program to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss globally, at a quite affordable price tag in today’s financial world. This is an objective that has been endorsed internationally, including as a target for the Millennium Development goals. Investments in conservation have been shown to generate not only biodiversity outcomes but also produce economic gains for local communities and regional economies, including by securing the provision of vital ecosystem services. If spread across the multitude of geographies, spanning the many thousands of species we know are threatened, the result could be beneficial across a range of societal improvement objectives.
 
Here at the GEF we are not seating idly. Anticipating these opportunities, and responding to the guidance we received from our donors and recipient countries, proof of concept projects are under rapid development. The GEF council has approved three projects recently that will together test the waters for threatened species conservation financing. The first of these is the Tiger Futures project, implemented by the World Bank, and executed by many other partners, seeking to conserve tiger habitat across the entire range of the species. The second, implemented by UNEP, and executed by civil society partners, builds upon the AZE concept (Alliance for Zero Extinction – see Ricketts, T.H., et al. 2005. Pinpointing and preventing imminent extinctions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - US. 51: 18497-18501). The AZE approach seeks to identify and safeguard key sites where species are in imminent danger of disappearing globally. The third project, also implemented by the World Bank, will look at innovative mechanisms to attract private sector funding for threatened species conservation by engaging companies – potentially thousands - that have built their brands borrowing inspiration from a plethora of species. This blog will return to these projects as they evolve further.
 
The take home message is that we could do a lot of good for global biodiversity for a relatively very low cost. The recent economic bailout packages have helped us put these vital outcomes for human society under the proper perspective.