Climate change is likely to emerge as one of the leading global threats to biodiversity by significantly increasing extinction risk for a large number of species. To the extent that climate change increases the number of threatened or endangered species, it is likely to increase conservation efforts and costs. Here, we examine determinants of federal spending on species protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in order to predict future federal conservation spending under conditions of climate change. In the spirit of “harnessing the ecological data revolution,” we have compiled an 18-year panel dataset of US government spending on over 1000 endangered and threatened species. We combine this panel data with conservation status assessments of approximately 60,000 US species. This wealth of data enables us to jointly estimate factors determining the probability of being listed under the ESA and, conditional on being listed, the level of spending received. The much longer panel dataset allows us to apply empirical approaches not available to earlier analyses performed on the very earliest years of reported spending. We then combine these results with predictions of extinction risks from climate change to provide an estimate of the implications of climate change for conservation spending.
Results/Conclusions
Consistent with previous work, we find that species characteristics likely linked to social preferences greatly influence spending decisions. Spending decisions exhibit taxonomic biases such that mammals, birds and fish receive more money than plants and invertebrates. Species with wider distributions also receive significantly more funding. However, the number of administrative regions a species occurs across seems to play a larger role in funding than distribution breadth; even conditioned on range size, a species that occurs in two administrative regions receives 90% more spending than one that occurs in only one region, possibly reflecting political economic factors involved in the allocation of funds. We also find that degree of threat and recovery potential play modest roles in fund allocation. Increased funding is provided to species with higher recovery potentials, consistent with a goal of recovering a maximum number of species. Simultaneously, increased funding is provided to species facing higher a degree of threat, consistent with a goal of avoiding a maximum number of extinctions. In our preliminary analyses of climate-driven extinction risk, we find heterogeneity in the effect of temperature increases on different taxa. The differing climate-driven extinction risks among taxa has important implications for the US government’s taxon-biased spending decisions.