Connect & Conserve

Connect & Conserve traces conservation funding organization by organization, so anyone can see where the money goes and where it does not. Conservation spending is reported in thousands of separate places: national charity registers, annual accounts, and tax filings such as the United States IRS Form 990. Individually those records say little about the field as a whole. Gathered together and matched to the places and species each organization actually works on, they start to answer questions the sector cannot otherwise answer.

The project builds an open register of conservation organizations worldwide and reads each one's own public description of its work, recording the countries it operates in, the species groups it addresses, the habitats it works in, and the services it provides. Those records are then set against the money each organization reports, so funding can be compared with need rather than with reputation.

What the data shows most clearly is imbalance. Conservation money is concentrated in a small number of countries and a small number of well-known species groups, while many of the places holding the most threatened biodiversity attract little traceable funding at all. Some countries that appear unfunded are simply unrecorded, which is itself a finding: a sector that cannot see its own distribution of effort cannot direct that effort well. Making the distribution visible, with its gaps and its uncertainties stated, is the point of the work.

Every figure on this site is derived from public records, and the methods, known limitations and open questions are published alongside the results rather than tucked away. Where a number is a floor rather than a count, or rests on an incomplete source, it is labelled as such.

Who runs this

Connect & Conserve is a project of The Biodiversity Group, a nonprofit conservation organization working on threatened species and the habitats they depend on. The Biodiversity Group also publishes the Species Black List, a register of species that science has effectively overlooked. You can reach us at business@biodiversitygroup.org.

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