"True" Conservation Progress

McDonald‐Madden, Eve; Gordon, Ascelin; Wintle, Brendan A.; Walker, Susan; Grantham, Hedley S.; Carvalho, Sílvia B.; Bottrill, Madeleine C.; Joseph, Liana N.; Ponce, R.; Stewart, Romola; Possingham, Hugh P.

doi:10.1126/science.1164342

Cited by 37 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…However, without a genuine balance sheet showing not just conservation wins, such as new protected areas, but the losses too (McDonald-Madden et al 2009), we risk entrenching biodiversity losses while at the same time celebrating what we think are gains.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactions Between Biodiversity Offsets and Protected Area Commitments: Avoiding Perverse Outcomes

Maron

Gordon

Mackey

et al. 2016

CONSERVATION LETTERS

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Economic growth is often in conflict with environmental goals. Biodiversity offsetting attempts to resolve this conflict by requiring industries to compensate for the biodiversity loss they cause, by generating an equivalent biodiversity gain elsewhere. Offsets for environmental impacts are increasingly being seen as a way to help meet preexisting conservation targets, such as those relating to the establishment and management of protected areas. We examine how using offsets to meet a state or organization's genuine commitments, which are not contingent on the offsets, results in no additional conservation benefit. In this case, either the offset or the preexisting commitment is invalid. For example, the use of offsets to meet commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity requires an admission that those commitments would otherwise not be met. This interaction between international agreements around protected areas and offset policy can generate perverse incentives, which must be carefully managed to avoid poor conservation outcomes. We propose separate accounting for conservation gains generated using offsets, and that future conservation agreements and targets should explicitly separate commitments met using offset gains from those which are not reliant on equivalent losses.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactions Between Biodiversity Offsets and Protected Area Commitments: Avoiding Perverse Outcomes

Maron

Gordon

Mackey

et al. 2016

CONSERVATION LETTERS

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“…The Australian Government for example, currently devotes only about 10% of its total conservation budget on expansion of protected areas (Department of the Environment Water Heritage and the Arts 2008a) although this represents an increase above the level of 3% per annum over several preceding years. Critics of protected areas cite the generation of conflicts with land and water users (Vanclay 2001; Wilshusen et al 2002;Agardy et al 2005;Kaiser 2005;Pearce et al 2005), that protected areas are often placed in areas already at little genuine risk of loss (Ferraro and Pattanayak 2006;Joppa and Pfaff 2009) and that the expansion of protected areas has been too slow to counter pervasive habitat destruction (McDonald-Madden et al 2009). There is some empirical evidence that protected areas work for threatened species.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, rates of expansion of protected areas may be too slow to counter widespread habitat destruction (McDonald-Madden et al 2009). Habitat protection legislation is potentially much more powerful in stopping or slowing habitat destruction because it can be applied over all tenures and land-uses over an entire jurisdiction.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What works for threatened species recovery? An empirical evaluation for Australia

Taylor¹,

Sattler

Evans

et al. 2011

Biodivers Conserv

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Despite the growing numbers of threatened species and high levels of spending on their recovery worldwide, there is surprisingly little evidence about which conservation approaches are effective in arresting or reversing threatened species declines. Using two government data sets, we examined associations between population trends for 841 nationally-threatened terrestrial species in Australia, and four measures of conservation effort: (a) how much their distribution overlaps with strictly protected areas (IUCN I-IV), (b) and other protected areas (IUCN V-VI), (c) the number of recovery activities directed at the species, and (d) numbers of natural resource conservation activities applied in areas where populations of the threatened species occur. We found that all populations of 606 (72%) species were in decline. Species with greater distributional overlap with strictly protected areas had proportionately more populations that were increasing or stable. This effect was robust to geographic range size, data quality differences and extent of protection. Measures other than strictly protected areas showed no positive associations with stable or increasing trends. Indeed, species from regions with more natural resource conservation activities were found to be more likely to be declining, consistent with differential targeting of such generalised conservation activities to highly disturbed landscapes. Major differences in trends were also found among the different jurisdictions in which species predominantly occurred, which may be related to different legislative protections against habitat destruction. Although we were not able to test causation, this research corroborates other evidence that protected areas contribute to the stabilization or

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the last decade, it has been emphasized that conservation science and practice should consider net, rather than absolute, outcomes of interventions [4][5][6]. For instance, McDonald-Madden et al [5] state that for conservation, in general, 'gains and losses must both be presented as an auditable conservation balance sheet'. There has been a proliferation of policies incorporating the 'no net loss' principle, whereby negative impacts on biodiversity associated with human activities are required to be compensated for by conservation actions, theoretically resulting in a neutral net outcome for nature [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How humans drive speciation as well as extinction

Bull

Maron

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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A central topic for conservation science is evaluating how human activities influence global species diversity. Humanity exacerbates extinction rates. But by what mechanisms does humanity drive the emergence of new species? We review human-mediated speciation, compare speciation and known extinctions, and discuss the challenges of using net species diversity as a conservation objective. Humans drive rapid evolution through relocation, domestication, hunting and novel ecosystem creation-and emerging technologies could eventually provide additional mechanisms. The number of species relocated, domesticated and hunted during the Holocene is of comparable magnitude to the number of observed extinctions. While instances of human-mediated speciation are known, the overall effect these mechanisms have upon speciation rates has not yet been quantified. We also explore the importance of anthropogenic influence upon divergence in microorganisms. Even if human activities resulted in no net loss of species diversity by balancing speciation and extinction rates, this would probably be deemed unacceptable. We discuss why, based upon 'no net loss' conservation literature-considering phylogenetic diversity and other metrics, risk aversion, taboo trade-offs and spatial heterogeneity. We conclude that evaluating speciation alongside extinction could result in more nuanced understanding of biosphere trends, clarifying what it is we actually value about biodiversity.

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"True" Conservation Progress

Cited by 37 publications

References 7 publications

Interactions Between Biodiversity Offsets and Protected Area Commitments: Avoiding Perverse Outcomes

Interactions Between Biodiversity Offsets and Protected Area Commitments: Avoiding Perverse Outcomes

What works for threatened species recovery? An empirical evaluation for Australia

How humans drive speciation as well as extinction

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