Regulatory biodiversity trading (or biodiversity "offsets") is increasingly promoted as a way to enable both conservation and development while achieving "no net loss" or even "net gain" in biodiversity, but to date has facilitated development while perpetuating biodiversity loss. Ecologists seeking improved biodiversity outcomes are developing better assessment tools and recommending more rigorous restrictions and enforcement. We explain why such recommendations overlook and cannot correct key causes of failure to protect biodiversity. Viable trading requires simple, measurable, and interchangeable commodities, but the currencies, restrictions, and oversight needed to protect complex, difficult-to-measure, and noninterchangeable resources like biodiversity are costly and intractable. These safeguards compromise trading viability and benefit neither traders nor regulatory officials. Political theory predicts that (1) biodiversity protection interests will fail to counter motivations for officials to resist and relax safeguards to facilitate exchanges and resource development at cost to biodiversity, and (2) trading is more vulnerable than pure administrative mechanisms to institutional dynamics that undermine environmental protection. Delivery of no net loss or net gain through biodiversity trading is thus administratively improbable and technically unrealistic. Their proliferation without credible solutions suggests biodiversity offset programs are successful "symbolic policies," potentially obscuring biodiversity loss and dissipating impetus for action.

We use a globally unique dataset that scores every individual academic's holistic research performance in New Zealand to test several common explanations for the gender pay gap in universities. We find a man's odds of being ranked professor or associate professor are more than double a woman's with similar recent research score, age, field, and university. We observe a lifetime gender pay gap of~NZ$400,000, of which research score and age explain less than half. Our ability to examine the full spectrum of research performance allows us to reject the 'male variability hypothesis' theory that the preponderance of men amongst the 'superstars' explains the lifetime performance pay gap observed. Indeed women whose research career trajectories resemble men's still get paid less than men. From 2003-12, women at many ranks improved their research scores by more than men, but moved up the academic ranks more slowly. We offer some possible explanations for our findings, and show that the gender gap in universities will never disappear in most academic fields if current hiring practices persist.

We examined consensus-based management through the lens of the Colorado River Recovery Implementation Program, a consensus-based plan that attempts to develop the Colorado River's water while protecting its endangered fishes. Because this management model has been touted as a preferred substitute to government-imposed regulation, we analyzed the recovery implementation program to determine its strengths and weaknesses. By reviewing secondary information and interviewing members of the diverse groups involved in the program, we gathered detailed information about the program's history, implementation, and progress. Our investigation revealed that the recovery implementation program has allowed development of the Colorado River's water and incorporated more voices into the decision-making process. But the program circumvented federal authority over endangered species conservation, which has proved detrimental to the fishes. Furthermore, we learned that the consensus-based model is vulnerable to control by special-interests and may be driven by bureaucratic procedural goals rather than species recovery. To ameliorate these concerns, (1) program success should be judged by species recovery, rather than political achievements, (2) the federal government should retain the power of issuing statutory sanctions in the event of continued population decline, and (3) funding should be provided by an agency with a clear species-protection agenda to reduce the disproportionate power of utilitarian interest groups. By incorporating these recommendations, conservation programs can better realize the benefits of a consensus-based approach without sacrificing species recovery.

Human activity is changing the biosphere in unprecedented ways, and addressing this challenge will require changes in individual and community patterns of behavior. One approach to managing individual behaviors is “top-down” and involves imposing sanctions through legislative frameworks. However, of itself, a top-down framework does not appear sufficient to encourage the changes required to meet environmental sustainability targets. Thus, there has been interest in changing individual-level behavior from the “bottom-up” by, for example, fostering desirable pro-environmental behaviors via social norms. Social norms arise from expectations about how others will behave and the consequences of conforming to or departing from them. Meta-analyses suggest that social norms can promote pro-environmental behavior. Environmental social norms that appear to have changed in recent decades and have themselves promoted change include recycling, include nascent behavioral shifts such as the move away from single-use plastics and flight shaming (flygskam). However, whether the conditions under which pro-environmental social norms emerge and are adhered to align with environmental systems’ features is unclear. Furthermore, individuals might feel powerless in a global system, which can limit the growth and influence of pro-environmental norms. We review the conditions believed to promote the development of and adherence to social norms, then consider how those conditions relate to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. While promoting social norms has a valuable role in promoting pro-environmental actions, we conclude that norms are most likely to be effective where individual actions are immediately evident and have an obvious and local effect.