Abstract Biodiversity is not evenly distributed across the globe and some areas have greater potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation than others. Whilst there are multiple ways to determine priority areas for conservation, for a global institution like the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the funding mechanism for the Convention on Biological Diversity and the largest multilateral source of funding for developing countries focused on enhancing biodiversity outcomes and promoting sustainable use, it is important to fund the top-ranked countries whilst also ensuring that all eligible countries are able to undertake some biodiversity conservation actions in accordance with the Convention. To this end, the GEF uses the System for Transparent Allocation of Resources (STAR) to allocate funding in separate funding rounds to eligible countries. This country focus means that all prioritization analyses need to be undertaken within that political framework, while also considering the intrinsic patterns in biodiversity that don’t respect national borders. We present the 2018 update of the biodiversity component of GEF-STAR, investigate how the weighting system affects the ranking of countries. We show that top ranked and bottom ranked countries are robust to changes in the weighting of analytical elements, but the weighting can significantly alter the importance of middle ranking countries, affecting their funding allocation. This analysis has been used by the GEF, along with other data, to allocate over $1 billion in biodiversity funding (GEF-7 = $1.2 billion) to improve country and global prospects for conservation. However, this large funding allocation for conservation needs to be set against the vastly larger funding flows that decrease natural values around the world, and the need for systems level change remains evident across the entire planet.

The Global Environment Facility approach for allocating biodiversity funding to countries