Measuring triage

New Zealand and the Australian states of New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania are all taking a potentially revolutionary approach to how they manage endangered species.  Using a system unique to the values and legal requirements of each, these four governments have built new tools to prioritize endangered species spending so they use money more cost-effectively.  The result of this explicit use of decision theory or 'decision science' is a different allocation of money among endangered species.  Those that are more unique, cheaper to save, more likely to respond to intervention, or whose conservation benefits more other species might all benefit from these systems.  However, the flip side that has opened these systems to criticism is that this represents explicit triage - letting species go extinct.  Professors Hugh Possingham and Stuart Pimm debate the issue here. 

I am firmly on the side of using decision science to make better decisions, particularly in the U.S.  The reality is that we already have an unconscious system of triage.  For example, there are more than 110 species that - for most of the last 20 years - have received average funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of less than 10 percent of recovered species in their same taxonomic group and each of these species have also been consistently reported as declining by the same agency.  That is probably an extremely low estimate of our current, somewhat accidental system of triage.  Approximately 10 percent of species I looked at are getting a pittance of funding and are consistently declining.

The advantage of the New Zealand and Australian systems is that these decisions are made explicitly those agencies may be doing less triage and when they are making choices to focus on other species, the reasons for doing so are clear.