Effective conservation science must shift away from doomsday views and toward solutions: Study

Source: Effective conservation science must shift away from doomsday views and toward solutions: Study

• Too much of conservation research focuses on describing the state of nature, in particular declines in biodiversity, and not on developing sustainable solutions to conservation challenges, say the authors of a new study.
• Studies that “ring the alarm bell” tend to dominate because of the challenges of doing the kind of complex multidisciplinary research needed to develop workable solutions, and the fact that professional and financial incentives are lacking for the latter kind of work.
• The researchers highlighted three cases in which the accumulated body of research on a particular conservation challenge took a solution-oriented trajectory and met with success: South Asian vultures, whooping cranes, and seabird bycatch.

Conservation science that more effectively serves the goals of protecting and enhancing global biodiversity must shift away from tracking declines and toward devising real-world solutions, a recent study suggests.

Too much of the field’s research focuses on describing the state of nature (such as the fact that a particular population is declining), and too little on what is causing those declines and how to address it, the authors write in their paper in the journal Conservation Letters.

“There seems to be this disconnect between what everybody knows needs to be done, and what’s actually being done,” co-author David Williams, a conservation scientist at the University of Leeds, said in an interview with Mongabay.