I have just read an excellent article by John Hopkins in the August 2007 edition of British Wildlife. It gives a very well balanced account of the new challenges presented to conservation by climate change and describes how conservation practitioners will have to adapt their management strategies to meet this new threat.
Reading the article brought home to me the scale of the challenges that lie ahead for conservationists, but it also made me realise how poorly equipped we are to meet them, both in terms of our ecological knowledge and in our funding for conservation. I kept thinking, “How much is all of this going to cost and who is going to pay for it?”
The RSPB, who have just released a similar report entitled ‘Climate Change: Wildlife and Adaptation’, believe that there is already a shortfall in funding of £300 million each year for achieving our current conservation objectives. They say that, unless this shortfall is met, we stand little chance of meeting the additional threats from climate change in the future.
We are already struggling to meet the conservation challenges of today, let alone new ones that lie in the future. Image by Tony Wills. Some rights reserved.
It therefore seems that, while the value of to our society of wildlife, biodiversity and a healthy environment are widely accepted, there is growing concern that the level of investment in conservation and conservation biology is far too little to even maintain the status quo, let alone meet the further demands placed on us by newly emerging threats, such as climate change.
I wanted to know how much funding there is for conservation and conservation research in the UK and, more importantly, is it enough to meet the challenges we have to face as conservationists now and in the future? To answer this question, I decided to explore the question of conservation funding: how much there is, where it comes from and where how it gets spent.
As with the fight to slow climate change, the importance that we, as a society, place on wildlife conservation can only really be measured by looking at what we do and at the sacrifices we are willing to make. When people genuinely care about something they are more likely to invest time and money in it, whether as individuals or as a society.
An example of this, at the largest possible scale, is the British Government. They acknowledged the importance of biodiversity conservation on an international stage at the Rio Convention and have done so many times since by endorsing European legislation on the issue, but are they really committed to this cause. Are the government really putting their money where their mouth is or are they just making empty promises?
I decided that the best place to start my assessment of conservation funding would be the 2006 budget. In it Gordon Brown planned to spend £552 billion of tax-payers money, of which £3.5 billion (<1%) was allocated to NERC and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
Of this money, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) receives a budget of £263 million, of which 4% (£10.6 million) is spent on ‘terrestrial and freshwater science’ and 6% (£16 million) on ‘marine science’. However, a search of the grants they have awarded in the last 16 years reveals that just £1 million a year has gone to projects with the word ‘conservation’ in their title or abstract. This seems to confirm the widely held belief that applied ecological and conservation research projects are hard to get funding for.
The remainder of the government’s ‘environmental’ budget (£3.2 billion) goes to DEFRA, who divide it up between the many agencies that are responsible for the environment, food and rural affairs. In 2006, before the Countryside Agency and English Nature were merged into Natural England, English Nature, the public body responsible for nature and biodiversity conservation in the UK, received 88% of their annual budget from the government, a total of £73 million.
This level of funding is considerably less than the £753 million spent by the Highways Agency in maintaining and developing the road network in the same year and is only marginally more than the cost of a single Eurofighter jet which has an estimated cost of £66 million (the UK has so far bought 144 Eurofighter jets) (see below).
Of their £73 million annual budget, in 2006 English Nature spent 19% (13.9 million) on conservation, 8% (~£6 million) on grants to other bodies and 8% (~£6 million) on maintaining their 222 (92,000 hectares) of National Nature Reserves. Their accounts do not specify how the money for conservation is divided up between the 1,280 Local Nature reserves, 4,000 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, 9 National Parks and 36 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty that are the main focus of their work.
Having determined how much the government is paying for conservation and conservation biological research, I decided to look at how much other conservation organisations are spending.
My local Wildlife Trust (Berks, Bucks and Oxon) spends around £1.6 million on conservation each year, while other charities, such as Plantlife (£1.3 million), Butterfly Conservation (£1.5 million) and the Game Conservancy Trust (£3.4 million) all make similar contributions. Above these charities, in a league of their own, are the RSPB, who spend around £50 million, and the National Trust, who spend around £22 million on conservation each year. The spending of these 6 charities in 2006 was therefore over five times greater than the total conservation budget of English Nature (~£80 million compared to English Nature’s £13.9 million conservation budget).
I accept that my highly simplified calculations may overlook some considerable funding sources (local government, lottery and private-sector funding for example), but I feel that I have given a reasonably good indication of the current levels of public funding for conservation and conservation research in the UK. I do not know if this level of funding is a fair reflection of how much we as a society value wildlife conservation (as opposed to roads for example) and I do not know if it will be enough to meet our commitment to conserving our wildlife now and in the future. What I do know, however, is that for the cost of just one of our major road development projects or a single Eurofighter jet the government’s annual nature conservation budget could be doubled or even trebled.
Unfortunately, conservationists cannot decide how this money is spent, but it is essential that we continue striving to translate the unique and widespread public affection for nature and wildlife in the UK into the funding that will be needed if it is to be conserved.
Find out more about British Wildlife Magazine.
Read the RSPB’s ‘Climate Change: Wildlife and Adaptation’ report.
Read the DEFRA Annual Report and Accounts.
Read the Natural England Annual Report.
