Knowledge products comprise assessments of authoritative information supported by
standards, governance, quality control, data, tools, and capacity building mechanisms.
Considerable resources are dedicated to developing and maintaining knowledge
products for biodiversity conservation, and they are widely used to inform policy and
advise decision makers and practitioners. However, the financial cost of delivering this
information is largely undocumented. We evaluated the costs and funding sources for
developing and maintaining four global biodiversity and conservation knowledge
products: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the IUCN Red List of
Ecosystems, Protected Planet, and the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas.
These are secondary data sets, built on primary data collected by extensive networks
of expert contributors worldwide. We estimate that US160million(range:US116-204
million), plus 293 person-years of volunteer time (range: 278-308 person-years) valued
at US14million(rangeUS12-16 million), were invested in these four knowledge
products between 1979 and 2013. More than half of this financing was provided
through philanthropy, and nearly three-quarters was spent on personnel costs. The
estimated annual cost of maintaining data and platforms for three of these knowledge
products (excluding the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems for which annual costs were not
possible to estimate for 2013 ) is US6.5millionintotal(range:US6.2-6.7 million).
We estimated that an additional US114millionwillbeneededtoreachpre−definedbaselinesofdatacoverageforallthefourknowledgeproducts,andthatonceachieved,annualmaintenancecostswillbeapproximatelyUS12 million. These costs
are much lower than those to maintain many other, similarly important, global
knowledge products. Ensuring that biodiversity and conservation knowledge products
are sufficiently up to date, comprehensive and accurate is fundamental to inform
decision-making for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Thus, the
development and implementation of plans for sustainable long-term financing for them
is critical