Monthly Archives: November 2012

Ecosystem Services: Conservation’s Babel Fish

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The Babel fish is one of the more inspired forms of fictional biodiversity. It features in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (sadly no relative), and allows his antihero, the ape descendant Arthur Dent to traverse the universe with only his speaking handheld digital assistant, the Hitchhiker’s Guide, for company (forget Siri, Douglas Adams got there first).  The Babel fish is described as ‘small, yellow and leech-like’, and when it had slithered into Arthur Dent’s ear, he could understand anything that was said, in any language of the universe.  As usual in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, this turns out not to be entirely a good thing.

Many conservationists seem to hope that ecosystem services will work like a Babel fish for them.  For decades they have hammered on about how valuable nature is, and nobody has paid much notice.  Humanity blithely goes on strip mining the earth’s stock of natural capital and burning it getting rich, or just keeping alive. But the ecosystem services Babel fish promises to change all that.  Insert it into public discourse, and when conservationists speak of wildlife, biodiversity, endangered species or habitat loss, their listeners will hear human wellbeing, natural capital, nature’s supply chain, the stuff humans get for free.   When we speak about the importance of conservation, everyone will automatically understand what we mean. Continue reading →

What would it cost to achieve conservation targets?

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Two weeks ago Science magazine published online an article on the financial costs of achieving some important global conservation targets. The authors, most of whom are (like me) from partner organisations of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, looked at the costs of achieving two of the twenty ‘Aichi Targets‘ that were agreed in 2010 by the Convention on Biology Diversity. These were Target 12, to prevent the extinction of known threatened species and improve and sustain their conservation status, and Target 11, to expand and effectively manage protected areas so that they cover 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas, and 10% of coastal and marine areas. The paper comes up with a headline figure to achieve these targets of $78.1 billion US per year. This is certainly a very large number, but as the paper rightly points out, it is rather small when compared to what we spend each year on soft drinks.

Calculations like this are very useful, and they can have a powerful impact on policy. The release of the paper co-incided with the CBD meeting in Hyderabad, India, which finished last week. This meeting was dominated by discussions over how to fund efforts to achieve the Aichi Targets. The meeting eventually agreed an extra $10 billion US per year to support conservation in developing countries, and while the negotiations for this deal have been ongoing for months, the Science paper can’t have hurt those making the case for more funding at the conference.
Continue reading →