Environmental Protection: Has Listing Endangered Animals Kept Them Safe?
Thirty years after its controversial inception, no one knows how well federal legislation intended to protect endangered species is working, says environmental economist Paul Ferraro.
Solving that mystery is crucial, Ferraro says, because the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, is the United States' centerpiece policy tool for protecting declining biodiversity. "This is a huge deal," he says.
An assistant professor of economics, Ferraro is now studying the heretofore unanswered question: Would endangered species be any worse off if they were not listed by the ESA?
Using measures of species recovery from 1993 to 1997, Ferraro has estimated the size and significance of ESA listings on species recovery for 490 vertebrates.
"This research could have important policy implications," says Ferraro, who expects to finish the study by summer's end. "Our preliminary findings suggest that the ESA listing by itself does not appear to affect the probability that a species will recover or decline. However, the data do suggest that the combination of listing and substantial funding for recovery efforts increases the likelihood of improvement. Many people have long argued that just a listing by itself isn't enough. Funding has to go along with it."
Opponents of the ESA believe its regulatory restrictions place an unfair burden on private landowners, while many environmentalists insist the legislation is absolutely critical for saving species, Ferraro says. Even ESA proponents worry that the legislation unintentionally harms endangered species because landowners might take steps to keep them off their property, such as harvesting timber early if colonies of endangered woodpeckers are in the vicinity. "The euphemism for this behavior is 'shoot, shovel and shut up,'" he says.
Until recently, opposing sides in the argument over the ESA have had to rely mostly on anecdotal evidence to bolster their positions because the necessary data and appropriate research methods weren't available to gauge its effectiveness, Ferraro says. But he and economics doctoral student Monica Ospina have been able to study the ESA using a relatively new research tool called matching, allowing them to create a pseudo-control group of unlisted animals that are similar to listed ones. "You can’t simply use any unlisted species as a control," Ferraro says. "They must be roughly similar in all the characteristics you think would affect recovery."