OOS 13-3
Prioritizing endangered species recovery spending: Making our conservation values explicit
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) established a broad mandate to recover species at risk of extinction – to increase their abundance and conserve their habitats so that “the measures provided pursuant to this Act are no longer necessary.” Yet after 40 years of legal protection, recovery planning, and conservation management, the prospects for most endangered species in the United States is still quite dim. Ecosystems are rapidly changing, and the ecological stressors pushing species to extinction are so pervasive and persistent that a large majority of endangered species will continue to need legal protection and active conservation management for the foreseeable future. At the same time, government funding for endangered species recovery has been insufficient for decades and will likely remain so.
Results/Conclusions:
The US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service (the Services) can best manage limited recovery funding when they adopt systematic, biologically based criteria for prioritizing recovery actions. Without such criteria, the Services cannot ensure that recovery funding meets biological needs or is allocated efficiently. In this presentation we describe the Services’ current strategy for prioritizing the allocation of endangered species recovery funding; we suggest that the Services should engage the public in a structured process to develop a new prioritization system for allocating resources to recover more species; we discuss, by way of example, the conservation prioritization strategies developed in Australia and New Zealand; and we highlight some of the key challenges that the Services will confront as they articulate the goals of a new, more biologically based prioritization system.