The Conservation Intervention Cost Data Portal is a tool that provides resources to help scientists and practitioners identify and report on conservation intervention cost data and enable cost-effective conservation practice.

Why track and report the cost of conservation interventions?

Understanding the economic costs of conservation is necessary for conservation decision support and to achieve the greatest conservation outcomes in a funding limited world. However, considering how to collect data to estimate these costs is often an afterthought. There has been a recent push to develop tools to improve how conservation scientists and practitioners collect and use conservation cost data to enable best-practice conservation decision support methods such as prioritization or return on investment analyses. Yet, there is much work that remains to be done in implementing these ideas in practice. This portal aims to summarize cutting-edge tools and theory related to collection and reporting on the costs of conservation interventions and to provide a centralized repository of materials that can be used to help track and report the costs of conservation interventions.

Goals of this portal

1. Provide guidance on how to track and report costs of conservation interventions.
2. Compile and summarize literature that reports on the costs of conservation interventions.
3. Summarize existing intervention cost datasets.

The Center for Biodiversity Outcomes partnered with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a tool to compare different funding allocation strategies for actions to recover endangered species. Together, they created a tool called the Endangered Species Recovery Explorer. This work was motivated, in part, by recognition from USFWS of past critiques of its recovery allocation process.

The Recovery Explorer can be used to evaluate potential consequences of alternative resource allocation strategies. For example, the tool can be used to examine how different allocation protocols, under the same budget constraints, affect the number of species recovered and the number of species for which extinction is averted (broken down by geographic region and taxa); how different funding levels affect recovery outcomes; how different values-based inputs (e.g., desires for taxonomic representation or regional parity in funding) influence optimal allocation and recovery outcomes; and the effect of uncertainty in technical inputs (e.g., extinction risk, cost) on allocation and outcomes.

The Recovery Explorer tool is designed to be exploratory, not prescriptive, allowing decision makers to examine alternative approaches to resource allocation by making the important components of the decision process transparent.

Since the tool was launched, it has received notorious media attention – including mention in Science and The Economist.