A new study has found that small differences in how conservation goals are worded can lead to dramatically different decisions about which wildlife areas receive funding, and that current spending on African elephant conservation is poorly strategized across the continent.
The research, published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, focused on African elephants to examine how donor money gets distributed across protected areas. According to Phys.org, the researchers compiled population and financial data from 79 protected areas in 24 African countries, covering roughly half of the total continental elephant population.
The core finding is direct: optimizing a funding strategy for one specific goal, such as maximizing the total number of elephants across Africa, produces a completely different result than optimizing for a different goal, such as maximizing the number of geographically stable, viable populations. Neither strategy is wrong, but they lead funders toward entirely different sites. When the goals are left vague, the resulting funding decisions may serve none of them well.
The study also found that the right funding strategy changes depending on how much money is available. When budgets are small, it is more efficient to fund several smaller, more manageable sites to secure individual populations. As budgets grow, money should shift toward reversing declines in larger protected areas. That finding directly challenges the common practice of ranking sites from highest to lowest priority and simply funding them down the list until money runs out.
"Conservation plans often set out broad visions, but this work shows that defining more precise, measurable conservation goals could mean more sustainable and better-funded conservation actions," said Dr. Rob Critchlow, a co-author from the Department of Biology at the University of York.
"Donors, governments, and NGOs need to be explicit about what conservation success looks like before deciding where to spend," Critchlow added.
The researchers warn that current elephant funding is largely driven by the varying spending abilities of local governments and the unpredictable flow of philanthropic and non-governmental money, rather than by a coherent global strategy. The authors recommend that international investors, donors, and governments abandon top-down ranking lists and instead adopt what they call a portfolio approach, one that requires stakeholders to first agree on precise definitions of success before any funds are allocated.
The study does not name specific organizations or government programs that it found to be spending inefficiently, but its data covered roughly half the continental elephant population, giving the findings broad reach across the range of one of Africa's most closely watched species.
