Posted on behalf of Brendan Borrell

Eco-minded tyrants need not apply. A new analysis of foreign aid presented on Sunday at the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in Edmonton, Canada, shows that countries with the worst governance scores receive less generous conservation funding from the international community.

Daniel Miller, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues used a new, independent foreign aid database, AidData.org, which officially launched online in March, to sort through 9,445 biodiversity projects in 171 countries that account for US$18 billion in funding since 1980.

Miller became interested in the topic while working for the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago and discovering how difficult it was to find out what other private donors were doing, let alone governments. “We barely know what aid has been given in a very general sense across many different countries, let alone whether it has been effective."

Starting from an average of $200 million per year, biodiversity aid rose dramatically after the creation of the Global Environment Facility in 1991 and the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which set international aid targets at $1.75 billion per year. Although the international community has never met that target in 1992 dollars, it has since hovered at about $1.25 billion per year every year and reached $1.8 billion in 2005.

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. Unfortunately, Miller says, “A lot of the places that are important for biodiversity haven’t

had the best governance.”

Notably, Miller’s numbers are about 30% lower than those obtained from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) database, which relies upon donor’s cheery categorization of the

development projects they fund (published in Science). Despite his improved coding scheme, Miller had to include some questionable projects in his estimate as well. For instance, one $250 million World Bank project in Brazil was primarily a roadbuilding project, and included only a small component for building tourism in a national park.

“These results, if valid, suggest that funding for biodiversity is even less adequate than previously estimated,” Stuart Butchart, an ornithologist with BirdLife International in Cambridge, UK who has used the OECD database, wrote in an email. “Richer countries need to not only make greater efforts to tackle biodiversity loss at home, but

also to provide greater support to less wealthy nations in order ensure that they develop sustainably.