ADOPT A RANGER

HOW MUCH DOES A RANGER COST?

The costs of an individual ranger

The costs of a ranger vary from country to country.  As a rule of thumb, Adopt A Ranger targets a salary of double the minimum wage plus the compulsory social benefits in compliance with the national legislation and if necessary, an additional life insurance for the dependents. Additionally, the costs of a uniform and basic field gear.  

Typically, this costs somewhere between $2,000 (€1,600) and $5,000 (€4,000) per year, depending on the country. Assuming an average 200 working days per year, a ranger costs $10 - $25 (€8 - €20) per day. 

In some cases, there are financing mechanisms to match the funds raised with other funding, in which case we only need to raise $5 - $15 (€4 - €12) per day.

Depending on the recipient country, 50 - 100 people working together can finance a ranger if each makes a contribution of $50 (€40) per year. 

The efficiency of financing ranger compared to other conservation efforts

A lot of conservation organizations and carbon off-set programmes invest in buying and/or leasing land to create new protected areas. That sounds great, doesn't it? But is it really? Let's take a good look. 

First of all, most protected areas in developing countries have been selected for being rather special and often they are very large. The costs to manage a hectare of a large area are many times lower than of a small area. In Brazil, it costs about $60,000 per hectare per year to manage the smallest nature reserve of 2 ha, while it costs only $0.45 per ha to manage an area of 1,000,000 ha. This is because there are several costs that have to be made for every area, small or large. Moreover, the ranger density needed in small areas is much higher. So you get much more land protected by protecting large protected areas that belong to the government,

Buying new protected areas is not enough; after the purchase, you will have to manage and staff them. Newly bought protected areas need rangers just the same as existing protected areas. So by adding land to the pool of protected areas in a country, you just add to the need for rangers. Often your newly created land actually competes with the government for funding. So while your money is being used to buy new land for conservation, officially protected land is being occupied illegally because it does not have any field staff. By the end of the day, the country has much and much less nature, in spite of the land purchased with your money. If that money would have been used to hire rangers that would protect and manage existing protected areas, your money would have protected many more hectares than you could ever have done by contributing to buying land for conservation.

In most countries the nature reserves protected by the government, are among the highest priority lands for conservation still available. Many lands to be purchased by fundraising campaigns are much less important than those already protected by law. Adopt A Ranger very seriously considers the importance of the areas where it works for their conservation importance. So rangers paid from your donations will protect the best land available for conservation. In fact, Adopt A Ranger helps governments to assess which of their protected areas are the most important from  a conservation point of view, using the MICOSYS programme. So YOUR money always protects the protected areas of the highest priority in the countries where we operate.

Many projects from bilateral aid programmes finance consultancies and studies to help local communities to get more benefits from protected areas. These programmes are quite important, because it is very important to involve local communities in conservation. But as those projects usually don't finance field staff, and particularly fall short in financing rangers, they end up achieving rather little. Adopt A Ranger focuses on hiring rangers, while it also helps with know-how on how to involve those rangers in assisting local communities to get economic benefits from protected areas. This is a far more durable approach than being practiced by many projects financed by development organizations.  

For your convenience we prepared a text version of this website, which you can download here: Download Adopt A Ranger Webtext

WARNING

If you decide to make a contribution to Adopt A Ranger, please always make your payments either by paying electronically: (1) by credit card or Paypall over the internet,  (2) by a bank to bank transfer or (3) by by check, while stating at the back of a check that it can only be cashed into the bank account of Adopt A Ranger. Please never donate cash, because we cannot audit fundraisers and we cannot control if your generous contribution actually gets into our accounts. If in doubt, send us an email. Please contact us by email if you are concerned about the legitimacy of one of our fundraisers or the appropriateness of the fundraising methods applied.  Please read our disclaimer carefully.

On most pages you will see words in bold that are frequently repeated. These are search words and phrases for the search engines. Please forgive us when they sometimes undermine our text style.  Those words and phrases help other visitors find our website.

Adopt A Ranger Inc. is incorporated in West Virginia, USA, registered under control number 90701 enjoying exemption of Federal income tax under section 501 (c) (3) and in the Netherlands Stichting Adopt A Ranger under S200823 -  255 (4 today) -