Responses 1

Question 1

Brief history of conservation

Answer 1

19th century dominated by focus on beauty and large undisturbed landscapes

Bogd Khan Uul National Park est. 1783 - first protected area

20th century increased focus on human/ecosystem health and species

Protected areas are increasing, especially in the last 10 years.

Question 2

Global spending on biodiversity

Answer 2

The Convention on Biological diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global
Biodiversity Framework suggest $200 billion per year (Target 19) and also talk about a gap of $700 billion per year (goal D)

Waldron et al. (2020) estimated that for protected areas alone
$103 - $178 billions are needed,

… and that currently only ca. $25 billion is being spend on protected areas

But overall - steady increase in conservation responses, even if it doesn’t follow the pace of pressures on biodiversity
–> as a consequence, biodiversity keeps declining at an alarming rate

Question 3

What “tools” do we have: IUCN taxonomy

Answer 3

Land/water protection

Land/water management

Species management

Law and policy

Education and awareness

Livelihood, economic and other incentives

Question 4

What is important? what makes people act?

Answer 4

People care about what they know

People don’t act if there is no hope/reason

People need to understand the urgency

Question 5

What drives action (and what doesn’t drive action)

Answer 5

Conservationists have a somewhat lower environmental footprint than economists or medics, but this effect is weakened when you take into account socio economic variation across our sampled groups.

Variation in people’s combined footprint is independently predicted by their gender, nationality,
occupation, education, income and the environmental values – but not by their environmental
knowledge or knowledge of pro-environmental actions.

Knowledge measures are no greater among conservationists than economists.

Different components of people’s environmental footprint are typically not correlated with one another, and show differing demographic patterns - with better paid or older individuals, for instance, having a
higher footprint for some behaviors and a lower footprint for others.

Question 6

The role of hope

Answer 6

Study of Australians, assessing their engagement with conservation of the Great Barrier Reef

Asked participants what they could do to help the GBR, then classified their responses into 2 outcome variables: identifying climate actions and identifying plastic actions

Hope was associated with greater capacity to identify climate-related behaviors and plastic reduction behaviors, and greater likelihood of adopting climate-related actions

While not undermining the understanding of urgency, or “appreciation” of threats