Matches and Mismatches Between Global Conservation Efforts and Global Conservation Priorities

Abstract

Species extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate and there is a global need to understand whether conservation effort is appropriately allocated to protect those species at risk. In this study three major measures of global conservation effort across IUCN Red List Threats and Habitats were assessed; staff time spent by the largest cluster of conservation organizations in the world-Cambridge Conservation Initiative, efforts by international NGOs through social media, and global conservation research publications since the year 2000. We find global conservation effort is generally aligned with global conservation priorities, but there are important outliers. Shrublands and rocky areas receive disproportionately little investment across all effort measures relative to the number of high extinction risk species, threats from residential and commercial development receive relatively low research and time investment despite social media attention, while marine areas and climate change receive more attention than expected. Governments and society must make critical conservation decisions in the context of rapid global change, and there is potential for key Threats or Habitats to receive less attention than required. The global conservation community would be wise to carefully consider and improve its understanding of effort-priority mismatches if the greatest number of high extinction risk species are to be protected.

Global trends in geospatial conservation planning: a review of priorities and missing dimensions

“…Understanding how biodiversity dynamics operate on the landscape is also an integral part of the geospatial conservation planning process. However, there has been a long-recorded mismatch between conservation areas and biodiversity globally (Brum et al, 2017;Willer et al, 2019). This was demonstrated in our analysis, with a dominant focus on specific species of flora and fauna.…”

Patterns of Research Effort and Extinction Risk of Marine Mammals in the Philippines

“…Conservation is an evidence-based discipline (Sutherland et al, 2004) but recent global reviews have identified a mismatch between conservation priorities and evidence-generating research effort (Wilson et al, 2016;Lindegren et al, 2018;Willer et al, 2019). Moreover, in regions of top conservation priority such as Southeast Asia, there is a substantial lack of research effort to address knowledge gaps which are fundamental in addressing escalating global biodiversity loss (Sodhi et al, 2010).…”

Research effort devoted to regulating and supporting ecosystem services by environmental scientists and economists

“…This also helps to highlight deficiencies in research effort on different ecosystem types and ecosystem services of environmental science studies and economic valuations. Bibliometric methods employing publication counts have been used as indices to provide overviews of trends in research efforts across broad fields of inquiry [28][29][30][31] in both the environmental [e.g., [32][33][34] and social [e.g., 35,36] sciences. Although such metrics do not capture a number of important dimensions of research effort (e.g., including the number of researchers involved, the quality and costs of research, and the like), they nonetheless provide a crude measure that can be informative.…”