Allocating Conservation Resources Under The Endangered Species Act

We explore the allocation of recovery funds to species listed under the Endangered Species Act. We simulate outcomes from allocations based on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's priority rankings and on rankings used in U.S. states' Wildlife Action Plans developed under the Congressional Wildlife Conservation and Restoration Program. We find that these criteria yield modest improvements over the FWS's current allocations and that documented inconsistencies in these allocations do not have a detrimental impact on the effectiveness of conservation spending. We also find that alternative policy goals-promoting recovery or preventing extinction-imply a tradeoff between increasing the number of Improving species and reducing the number of Extinct species of roughly 2:1