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Pinning down the price of biodiversity

Conservation cost It would cost up to US$4.76 billion annually to protect the planet's threatened species from extinction, estimate researchers.

To establish and maintain protect areas, it would cost up to US$76 billion annually, they add.

An international team of scientists report their findings today in the journal Science.

"The total required [to protect biodiversity] is less than 20 per cent of annual global consumer spending on soft drinks," the researchers write.

Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity recently agreed to meet targets to preserve biodiversity by 2020.

Dr Stuart Butchart of BirdLife International and colleagues used data on birds to estimate the financial costs of meeting these targets.

They sampled 211 globally threatened bird species and asked experts to estimate the cost of preserving these from extinction.

The researchers then extrapolated this to the cost of protecting the 1115 globally threatened bird species and the cost of protecting all known threatened species globally.

"Threatened birds comprise 7.65 per cent of all threatened species on the global IUCN Red List suggesting that the total annual costs of conserving all 'known threatened species' ... may range from $3.41 billion ... to $4.76 billion," the researchers write.

The researchers also found it would cost US$76.1 billion annually to meet the target of managing and expanding protected areas to cover 17 per cent of terrestrial and in-land water areas (and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas).

"Meeting these targets will require conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude," write the researchers, but they add this is small compared to other expenditure.

Australian biodiversity expert Professor Hugh Possingham, from the University of Queensland agrees.

"We're talking about tiny sums of money," says Possingham, who was a reviewer of the study.

"For 20 per cent of Australia's defence budget we could not just secure all of Australia's threatened species, we could secure every threatened species on the planet."

He stresses that spending the money won't guarantee success, because multiple factors influence conservation outcomes.

"There'll still be some loss [of species] but it won't be catastrophic loss which is what we face at the moment."

Possingham says Australia is still underspending on nature conservation and this is responsible for a continued decline in species and landscape function.

"Our spending would have to go up about five to ten fold," he says.

Possingham says Australia has around 5 to 10 per cent of the world's biodiversity.

"Sadly we don't have 5 to 10 per cent of global GDP so we might need more help," he says.