To work in nature conservation is to battle a headwind of bad news. When the overwhelming picture indicates the natural world is in decline, is there any room for optimism? Well, our new global study has some good news: we provide the strongest evidence to date that nature conservation efforts are not only effective, but that when they do work, they often really work.
Trends in nature conservation tend to be measured in terms of “biodiversity” – that is, the variety among living organisms from genes to ecosystems. We treasure biodiversity not only for how it enriches society and culture, but also its underpinning of resilient, functioning ecosystems that are a foundation of the global economy.
However, it is well known that global biodiversity is decreasing, and has been for some time. Is anything we are doing to reverse this trend effective?
As part of a team of researchers, we conducted the most comprehensive analysis yet of what happened when conservationists intervened in ecosystems. These were interventions of all types, all over the world. We found that conservation action is typically much better than doing nothing at all.
The challenge now is to fund conservation on the scale needed to halt and reverse declines in biodiversity and give these proven methods the best chance of success.
First, the less good news
Globally, biodiversity is being depleted by human activities like habitat clearance, overharvesting, the introduction of invasive species and climate change.
To arrest its decline, people in various places have taken measures including creating protected areas, removing invasive species or restoring habitats, such as forests and wetlands. These efforts are interdependent with traditional stewardship of the world’s richest biodiversity by indigenous people and local communities. And in 2022, governments adopted new global targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
Our team, led by the conservation organisation Re:wild, the universities of Oxford and Kent, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, analysed the findings of 186 studies covering 665 trials of different conservation interventions globally over the course of a century.
We wanted to understand whether the outcomes of these conservation actions improved on what would have happened without any intervention. Lots of studies have tried to compare the effects of conservation projects this way, but this is the first time such research has been combined in a single analysis to determine if conservation is working overall.
And now, the good news
What we found was extremely encouraging: conservation efforts work, and they work pretty much everywhere.
We found that conservation actions improved the state of biodiversity or slowed its decline in the majority of cases (66%) compared with no action. But more importantly, when conservation interventions work, we found that they are highly effective.
Examples from our far-reaching database included the management of invasive and problematic native predators on two of Florida’s barrier islands, which resulted in an immediate and substantial improvement in the nesting success of loggerhead turtles and least terns. In central African countries across the Congo basin, deforestation was 74% lower in logging estates subject to a forest management plan versus those that weren’t. Protected areas and indigenous lands had significantly less deforestation and smaller fires in the Brazilian Amazon. Breeding Chinook salmon in captivity and releasing them boosted their natural population in the Salmon River basin of central Idaho with minimal side effects.
Where conservation actions did not recover or slow the decline of the species or ecosystems that they were targeting, there is an opportunity to learn why and refine the conservation methods. For example, in India, removing an invasive algae simply caused it to spread elsewhere. Conservationists can now try a different strategy that may be more successful, such as finding ways to halt the drift of fragments of algae.
In other cases, where conservation action did not clearly benefit the target, other native species benefited unintentionally. For example, seahorses were less numerous in protected sites off New South Wales in Australia because these marine protected areas increased the abundance of their predators, such as octopus. So, still a success of sorts.
We also found that more recent conservation interventions tended to have more positive outcomes for biodiversity. This could mean modern conservation is getting more effective over time.
What comes next
If conservation generally works but biodiversity is still declining, then simply put: we need to do more of it. Much more. While at the same time reducing the pressures we put on nature.
Over half of the world’s GDP, almost US$44 trillion (£35 trillion), is moderately or highly dependent on nature. According to previous studies, a comprehensive global conservation programme would require an investment of between US$178 and US$524 billion. By comparison, in 2022 alone, subsidies for the production and use of fossil fuels – which are ultimately destructive to nature as fossil fuel burning is the leading cause of climate change – totalled US$7 trillion globally. That is 13 times the upper estimate of what is needed annually to fund the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Today, just US$121 billion is invested annually in conservation worldwide.
Potential funding priorities include more and better managed protected areas. Consistent with other studies, we found that protected areas work very well on the whole; studies that highlight where protected areas are not working often cite ineffective management or inadequate resources. More large-scale investment in habitat restoration would also help according to this new research.
Our study provides evidence that optimism for nature’s recovery is not misplaced. Though biodiversity is declining, we have effective tools to conserve it – and they seem to be getting better over time. The world’s governments have committed to nature recovery. Now, we must invest in it.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.
Comments are open on selected articles and must comply with our community standards.
John Brown
logged in via Facebook
I often look at conservation and protection of areas as providing a future resource to repopulate the damage which modern capitalism is doing to the vast majority of the earth.
So far most people, including many so called green/ environmental loving people simply talk a lot but still vote for the same major parties to continue the same system with the politicians arguing that they can ‘fix’ any issues. (Beetaloo basin is the latest amazing piece of two faced political sell out supported by the Labor, actually ‘lite-Liberal’ party, and, so far, by the population)
Until the majority wake up and vote for the one party, and independents, that will actually make a change then the ‘oasis’s’ of biodiversity that are happening around the world will become ever more important and valuable.
The people doing this conservation work are the real heroes.
Brandon Young
The best chance of enough funding on the global scale to arrest the decline in natural systems, and to restore them to an extent that actually solves climate change, by restoring the water and carbon cycles to natural levels that automatically expel the excess heat from the system, is with a global price on carbon emissions which is fully distributed as national revenues for carbon sinking.
Increasing the volume of carbon sinking can be achieved in two ways, with a transition to regenerative agricultural methods which build up richer and healthier soils, and by the restoration of a variety of ecosystems that serve as natural carbon sinks. A carbon sinking reward price that grows and grows until the global volume of extra carbon sinking exceeds the global volume of industrial emissions will drive both processes on the planetary scale. It would give governments all the incentives and disincentives they need to adjust public poicy so that the destruction of the natural environment is stopped and reversed, in order for them to secure a share of enormous global revenues based on the total volume of expanded carbon sinking.
The more carbon is sequestered into agricultural soils, the more water is retained and circulated, the more that rainfall patterns are restored, the more reliable agriculture becomes, the more green plant growth is supported, and so the more excess heat the daily heat fluxes carry from the ground and release into the atmosphere, so the more is radiated into space. This is the process nature has perfected over hundreds of millions of years to stabilise the climate, and it can easily be restored.
The more carbon is sequestered into revitalised ecosystems, the richer the bioiversity. If carbon sinking becomes extremely profitable, for a boom phase where the nations of the world race to sink the most carbon, under a global scheme to meet the Paris climate targets at least, ecosystems that work as significant carbon sinks will be rapidly restored on the planetary scale.
Solving climate change and reversing the destruction of the natural world go hand in hand. Solve one, and automatically solve the other. Fund carbon sinking on the global scale, and automatically restore both biodiversity and nature’s tremendous power to stabilise the climate.
https://www.fixingthesystem.net.au/2018/05/15/global-carbon-sinking-fund/