A priority-ranking strategy for threatened species?

Summary

The rate of extinction has accelerated to the point where we are probably losing one species per day right now, and we could well lose one million of Earth's 5–10 million species by the year 2000, and a good many more within the early decades of the next century. Plainly we cannot assist all species that face extinction within the foreseeable future. Conservationists have limited resources at their disposal, in the way of finance, scientific skills, and the like. Even were these resources to be increased several times over, we could not hope to save more than a proportion of all species that appear ‘doomed to disappear’: the processes of habitat disruption are too strongly underway to be halted in short order. But when we allocate funds to safeguard one species, we automatically deny those funds to other species. Already we support only a small fraction of all species under threat, and we may soon find ourselves in a situation where we can assist only a very marginal number of species facing extinction. Thus a key question arises: how are we to allocate our scarce resources in the most efficient way to safeguard species? Indeed we may now have reached a stage where there is merit in determining which species are ‘most deserving’ of a place on the planet. Agonizing as it will be to make choices along these lines, conservation strategy should be as systematically selective as possible. This means that we should design analytic methodologies to enable us to assign our conservation resources to achieve maximum return in terms of numbers of species protected. In essence, a ‘triage’ strategy. An expanded approach along these lines postulates a quantum advance in our planning of responses to the growing threatened-species problem: while the techniques of the past have certainly helped the situation, we cannot confront the much greater challenges of the future with an attitude of ‘the same as before, only more so’—the future will not be a simple extrapolation of the past, but will represent a qualitatively larger set of problems, which require an appropriately scaled-up response in our save-species campaigns.