Tag Archives: impact

Conservation impact evaluation: the right answers, but only some of the right questions?

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It seems that impact is everywhere at the moment. Is our research having impact? Is our teaching having impact? Are conservation actions having the intended impact? These are very important questions, but they are also very difficult to answer, particularly when the things we hope to affect are complex processes that are terribly difficult to untangle (the policy making process, the career development of alumni, or the trajectories of socioecological systems).

Last week Professor Paul Ferraro from Johns Hopkins visited Cambridge as the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Sustainability Studies. Paul is a world leader in analysing the impact of conservation interventions, and a strong advocate of quantitative analysis that properly accounts for things like selection bias in treatments (e.g. the location of protected areas is non-random and this should be considered in impact evaluation). He is in the vanguard of a growing industry of people doing similar work, which increasingly fills the pages of the conservation science journals. To me, this research is fascinating and provides important insights that often challenge widely-held assumptions about things like the relationship between protected areas and poverty. Continue reading →

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Conservation: we are what we eat

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Living as I do in a northern European city, it is tempting to think of conservation as being something that happens ‘out there’ in tropical forests and coral reefs, with no connection to my everyday life. But on our increasingly globalised planet, the consumption choices that I and my fellow citizens make really do have a significant impact on biodiversity all around the world. A clear example is provided by the question of what we choose to eat and drink. There is overwhelming evidence that the ‘normal’ diet enjoyed by the world’s rich, and desired by the world’s poor, is highly damaging to biodiversity. Livestock are fed on soy grown on land cleared from forest. Fish are harvested using trawling technologies that devastate marine life. Tea, coffee and oil palm all replace natural forest, even when they are certified as biodiversity friendly. A recent article in Science makes the claim that “human carnivory is in fact the single greatest threat to overall biodiversity” because of the huge amounts of space and energy that go into meat production. More recently it has been claimed that giving up beef would reduce our carbon footprint more than giving up driving cars.

Given all this evidence, it might seem reasonable to expect that highly damaging food and drink products are being taken off our menus and supermarket shelves through a combination of regulation and consumer pressure. But of course this isn’t happening – far from it. So what is going on? Why is there not a sensible public debate about the relationship between food and nature? I recently took part in an event at Homerton College in Cambridge to discuss this issue, organised by Luciana Leite de Araujo, one of my fantastic Conservation Leadership students. I shared the stage with my colleague Ben Phalan, who knows far more about these issues than I do. This blog is an attempt to distil my thinking after the event, and to propose some ideas for a way forward. Continue reading →