Abstract
Through the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) and the financial investments of the LIFE projects, Europe has become an experimental arena for biological conservation. With an estimated annual budget of €20 billion, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has set an ambitious goal of classifying 30% of its land and sea territory as Protected Areas and ensuring no deterioration in conservation trends and the status of protected species. We analysed LIFE projects focused on animals from 1992 to 2018 and found that investment in vertebrates was six times higher than that for invertebrates (€970 versus €150 million), with birds and mammals alone accounting for 72% of species and 75% of the total budget. In relative terms, investment per species towards vertebrates has been 468 times higher than that for invertebrates. Using a trait-based approach, we show that conservation effort is primarily explained by species' popularity rather than extinction risk or body size. Therefore, we propose a roadmap to achieve unbiased conservation targets for 2030 and beyond.
Highlights
Overwhelming evidence exists that most Earth ecosystem processes are being altered by human activities, suggesting that we may have entered a humandominated geological epoch—the ‘Anthropocene’ [1]
Through the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) and the financial investments of the LIFE projects, Europe has become an experimental arena for biological conservation
We analysed LIFE projects focused on animals from 1992 to 2018 and found that investment in vertebrates was six times higher than that for invertebrates (€970 versus €150 million), with birds and mammals alone accounting for 72% of species and 75% of the total budget
Summary
Overwhelming evidence exists that most Earth ecosystem processes are being altered by human activities, suggesting that we may have entered a humandominated geological epoch—the ‘Anthropocene’ [1]. At the end of the trial period of the Habitats Directive, the EU launched a new Biodiversity Strategy intended to create Protected Areas for 30% of its land and sea territory by 2030 and ensure no deterioration in conservation trends and the status of protected species and habitats [7] The ideals of this ambitious plan resonate with that of other similar projects such as the Global Deal for Nature [8] or the Half-Earth project (E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation), which aims to protect up to 50% of the Earth’s ecoregions. Our aim was to obtain a comprehensive picture of the number of applied conservation initiatives and allocation of the LIFE’s conservation budget across the animal tree of life in Europe
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