A recent study found that vultures provide 1.8 billion dollars worth of services to the southern Africa region a year. This number is surprisingly high and was found by adding a variety of different services provided by the birds, from factors like cleaning the ecosystem by removing carcasses, to driving tourism, to protecting people and livestock from disease. Like we learned in class, many species provide a variety of benefits to humans and contribute to ecosystem services. While these are difficult to quantify in an economic sense, many of them are beneficial to the economy and conservation often has to be justified with a calculated dollar amount. The study reported on in this article does a thorough job of including different kinds of benefits that vultures provide. They include clear benefits to industry like how the vultures removing dead animals prevents disease from spreading to livestock and humans, but they also include more abstract benefits like cultural importance. While all these factors are important, as we learned in class, these valuations should never be taken as exact figures and are subject to a lot of interpretation. The article also includes input from other experts in the field talking about the findings. They emphasize that while the study is a good step in quantifying the value of vultures and highlighting their economic importance, the researchers could have provided more uncertainty metrics, especially since they’re combining such a wide variety of services, including very subjective ones like ‘cultural importance’ that are hard to translate to money. Even if the scientific repeatability of this kind of study is questionable, I understand the place they have in conservation, since unfortunately, it’s hard to justify conservation funding to public agencies and organizations without a dollar amount to report. There is also genuine value in being able to prove that these species matter, especially given that 7 of the 9 vulture species in the region are endangered. The study also brings to light conflicts that aren’t always considered in conservation; they found that traditional medicine using vulture parts amounted to 7 million dollars’ worth of value annually. Of course, this is a service provided by the vulture, but it’s also a threat to its population. As a vulture specialist from the ICUN states in an interview in the article, ‘Using animals to that extent will drive these birds to extinction’. In my opinion however, this kind of use isn’t in direct conflict with conservation. After all, traditional medicine providers and users are stakeholders in this conflict that are damaging vulture populations but also wouldn’t want to see them go extinct. I think that these stakeholders should be included in conservation efforts, since their usage of the birds could be regulated to a sustainable use level, and they could be motivated to support other conservation efforts for the animals.