How 14 Billion Dollars Protected Earth’s Species

Billions of dollars of financial investment in global conservation has significantly reduced biodiversity loss, according to a new Oxford University research. Image credit: Shutterstock Billions of dollars of financial investment in global conservation has significantly reduced biodiversity loss, according to a new Oxford University research. For twenty-five years, we have known that we need to spend more on nature conservation, or face a modern mass extinction as serious as that of the dinosaurs. But governments and donors have been unwilling to come up with the necessary budgets, often because there was little hard evidence that the money spent on conservation does any good (especially in developing countries, where investments can easily go astray). However shows that thanks to the $14.4 billion spent on global conservation between the 1992 Earth Summit and 2003, has significantly reduced biodiversity losses. The fruit of ten years' of collaboration, the study was led by Dr Anthony Waldron, a former researcher at the Oxford University Biodiversity Institute, who worked with the University of Illinois, Brown University, University College London, and the University of Georgia. The team built and analysed a huge database of conservation funding and biodiversity declines across 109 signatory countries that received the funding between 1996 and 2008.