Recovering Listed Species
ESA protections on private property are, in many cases, critical for the survival of endangered species. However, the ESA’s purpose is not merely to prevent species from going extinct; it is also to bring these species back “to the point at which measures provided pursuant to [the ESA] are no longer necessary.” This process is known as recovery, and it is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of threatened and endangered species in the wild.
To guide species recovery, section 4 of the ESA requires the development and implementation of recovery plans. These plans detail the actions and resources needed to recover a listed species. For each plan, the ESA requires “a description of such site-specific management activities as may be necessary to achieve the plan’s goal,” the inclusion of an “objective, measurable criteria which, when met, would result in a determination . . . that the species be removed from the list,” and an “estimate[] of the time required and the cost to carry out those measures needed to achieve the plan’s goal.”
Many factors affect whether this goal is realized, but one of the “best predictors of recovery success” is “the amount of government funding available” for recovery actions. While the FWS has a budget allocated for species recovery, it has consistently been inadequate to cover even the cost of preparing recovery plans, much less for implementing the actions described in them.
This problem of limited funding is exacerbated by how funds are allocated. One study determined that between 1998 and 2012, “over 80 percent of all government spending went to support 5 percent of all listed species.” While the allocation of funding is prioritized depending on species’ needs, taxonomic uniqueness, the degree of threat to the species, and its potential to recover, these priorities alone cannot account for how funding is allocated in all instances.
Despite the ESA’s mandate that recovery plans should be implemented without regard to the species’ taxonomic classification, the amount of funding allocated for recovery strongly correlates with such class. An analysis of recovery trends revealed that vertebrates received higher levels of funding than other taxa. Plants have consistently received the lowest amount of funding per species, with government spending, on average, well below their estimated recovery costs. As a result of this disparity, most species that have recovered are vertebrates; while 72 percent of listed species are invertebrates and plants, they represent only 26 percent of those that have recovered.
In conclusion, the survival and recovery of imperiled species in the United States depends in large part on endangered species laws. The ESA provides critical tools for protecting and recovering these species, and as it applies to wildlife, it has been wildly successful. However, for threatened and endangered plants, the future remains less certain. To protect and recover these species, the disparity between plants and animals at critical stages of the recovery process must be reduced.