The Investment to Save Globally Threatened Bird Species

Saving 1,100-plus globally threatened bird species from extinction may seem like a prohibitively expensive task, but the investment actually isn’t so staggering, according to scientists from BirdLife International (Audubon’s partner) and other organizations in a paper published last year in Science. Their figure: $875 million to $1.23 billion each year for the next decade. World leaders used those findings last October in negotiations at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, where world governments pledged $10 billion per year to developing countries to help slow biodiversity loss by 2020. “I think it’s important for people to understand how remarkably cheap it is and understand the enormous benefits by investing these sums,” says Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s Global Research Coordinator and an author of the paper. “The governments committed to improving the status of known threatened species.”