Foreign Aid for Biodiversity: Tyrants Need not Apply

Becca Madsen on August 13, 2010 Comment

Interesting research reported at July's Society for Conservation Biology meeting concluded that aid money abhors corrupt governance ("Eco-minded tyrants need not apply"). The research was based on a new foreign aid database called AidData.org that logs over $18 billion of biodiversity funding in 9,445 projects in 171 countries since 1980.

"In general, the money seemed to be flowing to the right places. Countries with the highest conservation significance - determined based on threatened species, endemic species, and protected area coverage - received the highest levels of funding. On the other hand, government corruption can hurt the prospects of biodiverse countries. Equatorial Guinea and other countries with low governance scores from the World Bank receive less aid." (from the Nature.com blog )

Some other interesting facts... aid for biodiversity averaged around $200 million per year prior to the early 1990s. After the GEF was started in 1991 and the '92 Earth Summit created ambitious funding targets, aid levels for biodiversity went way up and have averaged around $1.25 billion/year. Note that financing needed to achieve the 3 goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity is estimated to be between $10-50 billion/yr