Balancing state and volunteer investment in biodiversity monitoring for the implementation of CBD indicators: A French example

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), states have to provide indicators in order to assess the performance of their initiatives for halting the loss of biodiversity. Sixteen headline indicators have been identified for monitoring the CBD targets. Of these indicators only one, “Trends in the abundance and distribution of selected species,” is a direct headline indicator of “non-exploited” biodiversity. In France, the implementation of this indicator is completely dependent on data collected by volunteers. Since this investment of volunteer time is equivalent to savings in administrative costs, we attempt in this paper to assign it a monetary value. This enables us to estimate how much the French administration saves thanks to volunteer efforts and how much public funding would have to be invested if volunteers were no longer willing to participate in these biodiversity monitoring schemes. We estimate this amount to be between 678,523 and 4,415,251 euros per year, depending on the scenario selected.