The Case for Conservation Podcast

Among most legacy media outlets and on social media, narratives about environmental issues, as well as social issues, are noticeably more extreme than they used to be. From activists to academics and from organizations to corporations, it has become common to hear phrases like “shattering Earth's natural limits”, “ecological meltdown”, and “boiling oceans”. Much of this rhetoric comes from a place of genuine concern and it usu...

It’s not often that biodiversity legislation grabs international headlines, but thats what happened repeatedly in 2024 with the European Union’s new Nature Restoration Law. It happened first because of the ambitious nature of the law; and then because of the political tussle around its rejection and eventual approval. Along the way it gathered a trail of detractors and supporters, and has raised hopes as well as concerns, depending...

From time to time certain concepts rise to prominence in biodiversity conservation circles, and some of these follow in the footsteps of climate change analogs. One such concept is biodiversity credits. Biodiversity credits are a mechanism that allow for biodiversity conservation or restoration activities to derive a revenue stream through the production and sale of a quantifiable unit of improvement in biodiversity. Despite the te...

Half a century ago a group of more than 2,000 scientists signed a warning of environmental crisis and nuclear war. Named after the French town where it was compiled, the “Menton Message” turned out to be somewhat hyperbolic in its environmental predictions, and did not account for some of humankind’s remarkable developmental progress over the following decades. However, some of its concerns certainly remain prescient today. And so ...

International organizations, or “IOs” for short, are typically organizations to which multiple countries belong as members. They cover virtually every aspect of human endeavor and there are many that are related to environmental protection. International organizations may influence our lives quite profoundly and yet, outside our own field, we might struggle to name more than a few of them. Furthermore, it has been proposed that mos...

Protection of the environment is strongly associated with regulation of the human activities that threaten it, and regulation is usually administered by government. Although almost everyone would probably agree that some regulation is necessary, regulation has a patchy record when it comes to environmental protection. And there is another approach to achieving environmental goals. Free market environmentalism, instead of protecting...

There are few environmental issues more emotive than the hunting of whales. Although the focus of environmentalists has shifted to other topics in recent times, whaling remains contentious whenever it is brought up. This is understandable considering that, for the first half of the 20th century and into the 1970s, several whale species were hunted to near-extinction. But as crude oil took over from whale oil as the fuel of industry...

Agriculture has been by far the biggest driver of land change and land degradation worldwide. And yet, it is also fundamental to the very existence of humankind. This mismatch often comes up in public discourse. Over the past year or two, for example, several European countries have seen extensive farmer protests - against rising costs and restrictive environmental regulations, among other things. Environmental groups have responde...

Insects are among the most abundant organisms on Earth. About 350,000 beetle species, alone, have been described by science and this is considered to be only a fraction of their total number. In a variety of ways, insects are a fundamental part of natural and human-adapted systems. While some cause disease or ruin crops, others play a key role in ecosystem service provision, for example by pollinating certain crops or as food for o...

Humankind’s transformation of the Earth is embodied in the idea that we are living in the “Anthropocene”. Most people who have heard of this concept were probably unaware that it describes a specific unit of geological measurement - an epoch. A debate has been ongoing for more than a decade about whether to make that designation official - for the Anthropocene to take over from the Holocene epoch. This debate concluded just a few w...

Conservation and sustainability scientists are often expected to advise policymakers and other decision-makers. But some of the issues that they are expected to advise on, have broader consensus than others. So, when is it appropriate to advise? When is it appropriate to advocate? When should they simply present all the options or interpretations, and leave it to the decision-makers?

Françoise Cardou is a plant and a community ecolo...

Sustainability science, which includes conservation biology and various other environmental studies, is not a “hard science” like physics or mathematics. Nevertheless, one might expect it to be reasonably independent of political affiliation. But is this the case? If not, what is the problem with leaning too far in one political direction, especially if that direction is left and generally considered to be “pro environment”? If it ...

Capitalism gets a lot of negative press these days, and one of the main arguments against it is the environmental degradation with which it’s associated. But how much is capitalism itself responsible, and how much are people conflating it with associated phenomena? Are the realistic alternatives any better, or should our efforts be focused on reforming this system, which has already done so much for human flourishing?

Russell Galt h...

As a result of our success as a species, we have been ushering other species toward extinction for thousands of years. The pace of those extinctions increased markedly with the growth of the world’s population since the Industrial Revolution. But we are now within reach of the “Jurassic Park” -type fantasy of being able to reverse extinctions - to bring back species from the dead. On the other hand, assuming we get beyond the remai...

Many conservation managers and scientists may not be aware that there is a single, common set of global biodiversity targets that inform national conservation strategy in almost every country in the world. These 23 targets are the main part of the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework”, or GBF. The GBF was agreed on by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in late 2022, and the targets are meant to be ac...

This month’s episode is about activism and science communication, and whether or not they should be combined. There are obvious tensions here because science is meant to be as objective as possible, while activism is characteristically impulsive and political. And, of course, there can be activists on both sides of a debate. There can also be incomplete or poorly reported science, upon which that activism is based. On the other han...

Climate change gets a lot more attention and funding than biodiversity. But, as conservation organizations are keen to point out, climate and biodiversity are intimately linked and there is, therefore, a good argument for addressing them side by side. Part of that argument is that conserving biodiversity is good for the climate. But an even more obvious link is that climate affects biodiversity. Human beings can adapt rapidly to ch...

In decades past, conservation was notorious for ignoring other development goals. These days, its focus has expanded to consider those other goals, including the prevention of poverty and hunger. In fact, there seems to be a tendency to assume that conservation is always compatible with them, and necessary to achieve them. There is certainly truth in that, but are we talking enough about the inevitable trade-offs? And if everyone a...

Species. We take them for granted as the main currency of biodiversity. But how many of us really know what species are? And do we attach too much importance to them, especially in the context of conservation?

Over centuries, taxonomists have categorized and re-categorized life forms and graphically presented their relatedness in the form of a so-called ”tree of life”. The trunk of the tree is common to all life on Earth....