Increased Funding Needed for Endangered Species Act but Trump Is Coming!:

Increased Funding Needed for Endangered Species Act but Trump Is Coming!: Noah Greenwald and collaborators at the Center for Biological Diversity recently released a report detailing the inadequate the funding for protecting and restoring endangered species.  They point out that more than 60% of the funds spent are going to just 35 species. Of course, previous research shows that charismatic species tend to receive the lion’s share of funds though this report argues that the most direct reason for the concentration of funding in a few species is due to the fact that much of the money is going to protect species that are threatened by large federal water projects such as those run by the Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration and the authors acknowledge that these expenditures are warramted to ensure the survival of these “impacted species.”  However, the report cites how relatively reasonable additional amount of funds could be very effective in preserving additional species if they were modeled on the on the Hawaii Plant Extinction Prevention Program which, the authors claim, have an annual cost of only about 5000 dollars per species. The sad aspect of this report is that it comes just as the Trump Administration is about to take over the USFWS and, far from considering additional funding for the USFWS and endangered species (as would have been the case if Clinton had won), the new priority for wildlife conservation will be to preserve the Endangered Species Act at all much less hope for increased funding for it. See the report at http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/pdfs/Shortchanged.pdf
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