Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation

Bridging the Gap Between Global Commitment and Local Action

Ben Collen, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jonathan E. M. Baillie, Sarah M. Durant, Ben Collen, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jonathan E. M. Baillie, Sarah M. Durant

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444332926, 9781444332919
• eBook ISBN: 9781118490754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

As the impacts of anthropogenic activities increase in both magnitude and extent, biodiversity is coming under increasing pressure. Scientists and policy makers are frequently hampered by a lack of information on biological systems, particularly information relating to long-term trends. Such information is crucial to developing an understanding as to how biodiversity may respond to global environmental change. Knowledge gaps make it very difficult to develop effective policies and legislation to reduce and reverse biodiversity loss.

This book explores the gap between global commitments to biodiversity conservation, and local action to track biodiversity change and implement conservation action. High profile international political commitments to improve biodiversity conservation, such as the targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity, require innovative and rapid responses from both science and policy. This multi-disciplinary perspective highlights barriers to conservation and offers novel solutions to evaluating trends in biodiversity at multiple scales.

Chapter 1

Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation: Bridging the Gaps Between Global Commitment and Local Action

Ben Collen¹, Nathalie Pettorelli¹, Jonathan E.M. Baillie² and Sarah M. Durant²

¹Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK

²Conservation Programmes, Zoological Society of London, London, UK

Why a book on biodiversity monitoring and conservation?

As the impacts of anthropogenic activities increase in both magnitude and extent, biodiversity is under increasing pressure. Habitats available to wildlife have undergone dramatic modifications, and significant biodiversity has already been lost over modern times, while we are yet to experience the full impacts of anthropogenic climate change (Mace et al., 2005; Dawson et al., 2011; Pereira et al., 2010b). Over the past few hundred years, humans have increased species extinction rates by as much as 1000 times compared with background rates that were typical over Earth's history (Regan et al., 2001; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005), and accelerating increases in anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity may further increase species extinction rates (Balmford and Bond, 2005). In developing means to address these challenges, scientists are hampered by a lack of information on biological systems, particularly information relating to long-term trends, which is crucial to developing an understanding of how these systems may respond to global environmental change. Such serious knowledge gaps make it very difficult to develop effective policies and legislation to reduce and reverse biodiversity loss.

A further impetus for conservation action has been gained through an increasing realization that declines in biodiversity have detrimental impacts on ecosystem structures and functions as well as human well-being, particularly for the world's most marginalized and impoverished communities (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Biodiversity provides many products—often plants, animals, and fungi—that directly contribute to incomes and human livelihoods. Biodiversity also provides genetic resources for the pharmaceutical industry, which can be key in maintaining human health, while the growth of nature tourism has meant that biodiversity conservation has become a major contributor to many national economies, including those of some of the world's poorest countries. As well as delivering these ecosystem services, biodiversity underpins the functioning of ecosystems, and hence the delivery of services such as access to fresh water or climate regulation. Biodiversity is therefore key to security, resilience, social relations, and human health and hence affects people not only by way of material livelihoods and macroeconomics.

In order to counter global biodiversity loss and consequent impacts on human well-being, there have been several recent high-profile international political commitments to improve biodiversity conservation. These have mainly consisted of goal setting, in the form of conservation targets to which governments, decision-makers, and the international community are committed; the most notable example of which are the targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD; Convention on Biological Diversity, 2011; UNEP, 2002). However, because of the complexity of biological systems, and a lack of long-term biodiversity data, nations are hampered not only in assessing progress towards such targets, but also in developing appropriate policy and legislative responses to reverse biodiversity declines.

Global commitments to stemming biodiversity loss have contributed to the development of methods to track changes in many metrics of biodiversity, and addressing biodiversity information requirements has become one of the fastest growing areas of research in the field of conservation biology. This information is critical for increasing our understanding of the manner in which biodiversity is changing, and how changes can be influenced and reversed. It is also required for setting priorities for biodiversity conservation, such as protected area placement (e.g., Araújo 1999; Possingham et al., 1993; Rodrigues et al., 2004), species and ecosystem priority setting among the many deserving causes of conservation attention (e.g., Isaac et al., 2007; Myers et al., 2000), and for the biodiversity assessments required to provide the data for such activities (Baillie et al., 2008; Collen et al., 2012; Mace et al., 2008; Pereira et al., 2010a).

The process of reversing decline in biodiversity, at the outset, might appear straightforward. We should simply measure what is happening to the components of biodiversity that we wish to conserve; put in place conservation actions to counteract declines in the taxa and places that are changing most rapidly, or which we are least willing to lose; monitor and evaluate the impacts of these actions; and continue to manage adaptively. Yet our first collective attempt to measure and slow biodiversity change (the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010 Target) met with almost universal agreement that we had failed (Butchart et al., 2010; Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010). That there were only eight years between the agreement of that target (‘to achieve, by 2010, a slowing in the rate of biodiversity loss’) by parties to the CBD, and the deadline by which a change should have taken place, must at least partly explain why we failed to meet this target. Even with the strongest political will, a substantial slowing in biodiversity declines would not have been possible in the timeframe, unless the many and complex underlying drivers of decline were effectively tackled.

It has become clear though, in the myriad of post-2010 papers, reports, and evaluations, that there are some problems in the overall approach. First of all, the target set was not action orientated, nor tied to appropriate activities from which the impact of changing pressures on biodiversity could be measured. This has to some degree been addressed in the newly agreed Aichi Target and Strategic Plan for 2020. Secondly, there appeared to be a disconnection between these laudable global commitments to improving the status of biodiversity, and the local-scale action required to ultimately ensure their achievement. From a research perspective, there has been a focus on identifying the most effective means to generate the metrics of biodiversity required to measure significant change (Dobson, 2005; Mace and Baillie, 2007), and how best to fill the many gaps in biodiversity data (Collen et al., 2008; Pereira and Cooper, 2006). However, from a policy perspective it remains unclear how global targets should be harmonized with the many national responsibilities to biodiversity conservation and vice versa (Jones et al., 2011; Nicholson et al., 2012). Moreover, from a practical perspective there is a need to better coordinate biodiversity monitoring and conservation, at all scales, for increased efficiency and greater impact.

As the Aichi Target becomes agreed and implemented, it is extremely timely to reflect not only on lessons learned from the 2010 targets, but also on how we might better integrate national and global biodiversity monitoring and indicators over the coming decade. Such complex policy objectives present many challenges to conservation scientists and policy-makers alike. A key issue is how best to monitor progress towards such global-scale targets. There is also growing recognition of a need for biodiversity monitoring at a national, as well as a global scale, and better coordination between different monitoring approaches so as to make optimal use of all forms of biodiversity data. Although several indicators have been developed for use at the global scale, the data on which these indicators are based frequently come from monitoring schemes carried out with quite different objectives than monitoring global biodiversity change. While a dedicated global monitoring system may be ideal, would it be prohibitively expensive? Might a more cost-effective solution be to implement monitoring at a national scale, according to national priorities, and aggregate national measures to a global indicator? The scale at which monitoring takes place may need to be taken into account when assessing progress towards both global and national targets. At the local level, the theory of optimal monitoring is advancing fast; focusing on how best to allocate limited resources in the face of the inevitable trade-offs between monitoring and intervention, and explicitly considering uncertainty. This approach could potentially be applicable to promote more cost-effective monitoring across larger regional or national scales.

In this book, which results from a symposium held at the Zoological Society of London in summer 2009, we have addressed two key themes in biodiversity conservation and monitoring, bringing together insights from science and policy spheres: evaluating a variety of approaches to biodiversity monitoring that could help to provide indicators at national to global scales, and the steps needed to reduce the barriers for successful implementation of such approaches. Specifically we have focused on addressing challenges faced by countries in meeting their obligations under the biodiversity conventions, particularly CBD, and to help bridge the gap between international commitments and local action. We have structured this book around four areas: first, we examine the use of species-based indicators, and what they can tell us about the status and trends of several important metrics directly related to the overall health of biodiversity (Balmford et al., 2005; Green et al., 2005). These chapters describe how each measure of change in status might be appropriately used at the national level. Second, we evaluate indices of the extent and magnitude of threatening processes and the drivers of biodiversity loss, and how they might provide knowledge of how and where to prioritize conservation action (Mace and Baillie, 2007; McGeoch et al., 2010). These indicators are in general far less well developed than their biodiversity counterparts, and these chapters identify opportunities for their further development and implementation over the coming decade. Third, we examine indices of important components of biodiversity that are amenable to monitoring but are not yet being widely measured, and how they can contribute to future understanding of biodiversity change. Finally we explore how best to ensure that global commitment to biodiversity conservation and monitoring is aligned with local and national action. We focus on terrestrial biodiversity for this book, although many chapters are also relevant to the marine environment.

Biodiversity and human well-being

Societies value many different aspects of biodiversity. We concentrate here on two roles. Firstly, there is a view that biodiversity should be valued for its own sake. The simple existence of species, populations, and habitats is deemed a sufficient enough justification for their continued protection. Secondly, there is a growing more utilitarian view of our natural world. Biodiversity underpins the functioning of the ecosystems on which humans depend for a variety of services including food and fresh water, health and recreation, and protection from natural disasters. Current trends of biodiversity loss are thought to be endangering these services, such that continued loss may bring us to a point where the capacity of ecosystems to provide these essential services is catastrophically reduced (Diaz et al., 2006; Mace et al., 2012). Marine biodiversity loss, for example, is increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide humans with food, maintain water quality, and recover from anthropogenic perturbations (Worm et al., 2006). As well as being detrimental to human well-being, biodiversity loss is costly for society as a whole, particularly for economic actors in sectors that depend directly on ecosystem services. For example, insect pollination in the European Union (EU) has an estimated economic value of €15 billion per year. The continued decline in bees and other pollinators could have serious consequences for Europe's farmers and agribusiness sector (Gallai et al., 2009; TEEB, 2010), and, ultimately, for our ability to feed ourselves. The conservation of biodiversity also makes a critical contribution to moderating the scale of climate change and reducing its negative impacts on the functioning of ecosystems. This makes biodiversity loss the most critical global environmental threat alongside climate change; and these two threats are inextricably linked.

It has been suggested that effective conservation requires addressing three fundamental questions (Salafsky et al., 2002), namely:

• what should our goals be and how do we measure progress in reaching them?
• how can we most effectively take action to achieve conservation?
• how can we learn to do conservation better?

The effectiveness of biodiversity conservation therefore depends on our ability to define, measure, and monitor biodiversity change, and on adaptive responses to biodiversity loss of a wide group of stakeholders and actors, including governments, local communities, and international society. Yet ensuring that appropriate monitoring systems are in place and translating monitoring results into effective conservation on the ground remains a major global challenge for a number of reasons, including financial and technical capacity constraints and policy and legal barriers.

It should also be noted that biodiversity conservation is ultimately implemented by humans for human society, be it for economic, cultural, or other reasons. Biodiversity conservation is thus inextricably linked to human behaviour. Its effective implementation therefore also depends on a sound understanding of the influence that social factors (such as markets, cultural beliefs and values, laws and policies, or demographic change) exert on human interactions with the environment and choices to exploit or conserve biodiversity (Mascia et al., 2003).

Species-based indicators of biodiversity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Conservation Science and Practice Series
• Previously published
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation: Bridging the Gaps Between Global Commitment and Local Action
• Part I: Species-Based Indicators of Biodiversity Change
• Part II: Indicators of the Pressures on Biodiversity
• Part III: The Next Generation of Biodiversity Indicators
• Part IV: Biodiversity Monitoring in Practice
• Index