Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 44 to 50.

If we really care about nature, then surely conservation has to be practical; it needs to work. Everything we hear on the news seems to say the opposite: nature continues to go down the tube; extinction rates are increasing; new threats like climate change are emerging; and beautiful places are being destroyed before our eyes. All this is true; and yet…

If things are getting worse, it is obvious that conservation is failing. Well, no. In 2006, scientists at BirdLife International showed that conservation action had prevented 16 bird species from going extinct during the 1994-2004 time period. In 2014, scientists from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust found that sustained conservation action from 1988 to 2012 resulted in eight species being down-listed to lower categories of threat on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In a pivotal study in 2015, a group of researchers from the IUCN Species Survival Commission found that without conservation action that took place between 1996 and 2008, the status of the world’s ungulates (deer, antelopes, cattle and their relatives) would have been nearly eight times worse than was actually observed. In 2017, researchers were able to quantify how conservation investments made between 1996 and 2008 reduced biodiversity loss in 109 countries by 29% per country on average.

Once again, this suggests that although too little was spent on conservation, it had a significant level of success. As a result, decision-makers are now in a position, for the first time, to forecast what the positive impacts of any increase in conservation spending are likely to be in relation to different scenarios of human development pressure, and then compare these forecasts to their policy targets.

There is one clear conclusion from these and similar studies: conservation does work, but we do not do anywhere close to enough of it. The threats to nature are certainly growing and this means that we have to spend more on conservation just to stand still. On the other hand, if some of the commitments made by the world’s governments are actually acted upon, such as the 2010 Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, then the number of resources to be allocated to conservation is set to increase. Let’s hope that this will indeed be the case.

(Source: https://www.synchronicityearth.org/)

The word “quantify” in paragraph 2 can be replaced by __________.