Article impact statement: Questions regarding freshwater ecosystem conservation, role of social structure in human-environment interactions, and impacts of conservation need more attention. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[3] AbstractIn 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity [Sutherland et al. (2009) Conservation Biology, 23, 557-567]. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high-priority questions in the peer-reviewed literature. Here we take a first step toward re-examining the 100 questions and identify key knowledge gaps that still remain. Through a combination of a questionnaire and a literature review, we evaluated each of the 100 questions on the basis of two criteria: relevance and effort. We defined highly-relevant questions as those which -if answered -would have the greatest impact on global biodiversity conservation, while effort was quantified based on the number of review publications addressing a particular question, which we used as a proxy for research effort. Using this approach we identified a set of questions that, despite being perceived as highly relevant, have been the focus of relatively few review publications over the past ten years. These questions covered a broad range of topics but predominantly tackled three major themes: the conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems, the role of societal structures in shaping interactions between people and the environment, and the impacts of conservation interventions. We see these questions as important knowledge gaps that have so far received insufficient attention and may need to be prioritised in future research. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[4]
On a daily basis, political decisions are made, often with their full extent of impact being unclear. Not seldom, the decisions and policy measures implemented result in direct or indirect unintended negative impacts, such as on the natural environment, which can vary in time, space, nature, and severity. To achieve a more sustainable world with equitable societies requires fundamental rethinking of our policymaking. It calls for informed decision making and a monitoring of political impact for which evidence-based knowledge is necessary. The most powerful tool to derive objective and systematic spatial information and, thus, add to transparent decisions is remote sensing (RS). This review analyses how spaceborne RS is used by the scientific community to provide evidence for the policymaking process. We reviewed 194 scientific publications from 2015 to 2020 and analysed them based on general insights (e.g., study area) and RS application-related information (e.g., RS data and products). Further, we classified the studies according to their degree of science–policy integration by determining their engagement with the political field and their potential contribution towards four stages of the policy cycle: problem identification/knowledge building, policy formulation, policy implementation, and policy monitoring and evaluation. Except for four studies, we found that studies had not directly involved or informed the policy field or policymaking process. Most studies contributed to the stage problem identification/knowledge building, followed by ex post policy impact assessment. To strengthen the use of RS for policy-relevant studies, the concept of the policy cycle is used to showcase opportunities of RS application for the policymaking process. Topics gaining importance and future requirements of RS at the science–policy interface are identified. If tackled, RS can be a powerful complement to provide policy-relevant evidence to shed light on the impact of political decisions and thus help promote sustainable development from the core.
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