Over $1 billion per year is needed to recover ESA-listed species

Gerber (2016) estimate

The first estimate comes from Leah Gerber’s 2016 paper on conservation triage under the ESA¹, placing the cost of recovery at $1.21 billion per year. That estimate was based on recovery cost data from 2010 and for about 1,100 species; somewhat dated, but the estimate is consistent with our own calculations below. Further, this and any estimate based on the recovery plan cost estimates is likely a conservative estimate: Gerber noted that the cost to recover 15 species delisted because of recovery as of late 2015 was 74% higher than the recovery plan estimates. If that pattern held across still-listed species and the cost accrues on an annual basis, then we estimate the need at $2.26 billion per year per Gerber’s estimate².

Updated estimate

To update Gerber’s calculation, we derived an independent estimate using the 2013-2014 recovery report to Congress; see Calculations, below. Using the Service’s estimates of species cost of recovery and the time-to-recovery data in the report, we estimate the total cost of carrying out all recovery actions at $1.62 billion per year. In brief, the total recovery cost is estimated at $9.4 billion for 481 species with estimates in the report, for an estimated per-species cost of approximately $19.5 million. Multiplying the per-species cost by the count of 1,662 currently listed species, we estimate total recovery cost for ESA-listed species at $32.5 billion. Dividing that by the median time-to-recovery of 20 years—also calculated from the recovery report—we estimate $1.62 billion per year to carry out the recovery actions needed for all current ESA-listed species. The 95% confidence interval, based on 1,000 bootstrap replicates, is $1.22 to $2.06 billion per year.

Funding sources

A key value judgement that science cannot answer is how much different parties should contribute to the recovery of ESA-listed species. We can, however, consider patterns of past expenditures to help inform current and future allocations. Of the ~$1.4 billion in compliance and recovery expenditures reported in 2016, 80.3% came from other federal agencies, 13.4% from FWS, and 6.3% was reported by the States³. Under the North American model - that is, a model of wildlife management and conservation led by the States - this seems like a very skewed distribution⁴.

Conclusion

In short, both peer-reviewed published research and our own updated calculations from available recovery costs data put the cost of ESA recovery at over $1 billion per year. Filling this need will require that the sources of recovery funding be sustainable and balanced among various responsible parties.

Calculations

summary(dat$est_time_recov_num)

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##    3.00   11.00   20.00   22.18   30.00  100.00    1041

median_est_time <- median(dat$est_time_recov_num, na.rm = TRUE)

# total estimated recovery cost for spp *with* estimates
sum(dat$cost_per_spp, na.rm = TRUE)

## [1] 9400868544

# estimated cost per spp
est_per_spp <- sum(dat$cost_per_spp, na.rm = TRUE) / sum(!is.na(dat$cost_per_spp))
overall_est_past <- est_per_spp * length(dat$species)
overall_est_cur <- est_per_spp * 1662
overall_est_cur / median_est_time

## [1] 1624141738

# Now let's get some confidence intervals:
with_est <- filter(dat, !is.na(dat$cost_per_spp))
resamp_vals <- lapply(1:1000, FUN = function(x) {
  re <- sample_n(with_est, size = 481, replace = TRUE)
  tot_cost <- sum(re$cost_per_spp) / 481
  return(tot_cost)
}) %>% unlist()

quantile(resamp_vals, c(0.01, 0.025, 0.05, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 0.95, 0.975, 0.99))

##       1%     2.5%       5%      25%      50%      75%      95%    97.5% 
## 14042390 14583927 15608806 17677369 19501334 21361123 24146613 24799058 
##      99% 
## 26010737

quantile(resamp_vals, c(0.025, 0.975))

##     2.5%    97.5% 
## 14583927 24799058

LCL <- quantile(resamp_vals, 0.025) * 1662
UCL <- quantile(resamp_vals, 0.975) * 1662
LCL / median_est_time

##       2.5% 
## 1211924323

UCL / median_est_time

##      97.5% 
## 2060801736