Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:20:01.360Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Conservation and development: a cross-disciplinary overview

Part of: Multi-dimensionality of the biodiversity crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2020

José Maria Cardoso da Silva Open the ORCID record for José Maria Cardoso da Silva [Opens in a new window]  and
Julie Topf
José Maria Cardoso da Silva*
Affiliation:
University of Miami, Department of Geography and Regional Studies, 1300 Campo Sano, 33124-4401, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Julie Topf
Affiliation:
University of Miami, Department of Geography and Regional Studies, 1300 Campo Sano, 33124-4401, Coral Gables, FL, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Professor José Maria Cardoso da Silva, Email: jcsilva@miami.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

The ability of national governments to set and implement policies that protect biodiversity is currently facing widespread scepticism within the conservation movement. Here, we review the literature from several disciplines to outline a positive agenda for how the global conservation movement can address this. We combine the strengths of the people-centred and science-led conservation approaches to develop a framework that emphasizes the importance of ecological infrastructure for the long-term prosperity of human societies in an ever-changing world. We show that one of the major goals of the conservation movement (enhancing global ecological infrastructure to end species and ecosystem loss) remains central and irreplaceable within the broad sustainable development agenda. Then, we argue that the conservation community is now more prepared than ever to face the challenge of supporting societies in designing the ecological infrastructure they need to move towards more sustainable states. Because it is where global and local priorities meet, the national level is where impactful changes can be made. Furthermore, we point out two priorities for the conservation movement for the next decade: (1) substantially increase the amount of financial resources dedicated to conservation; and (2) advance the next generation of policies for ecological infrastructure.

Keywords

biodiversityconservationpublic policysustainabilitysustainability sciencesustainable development
Type
Subject Review
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 234 - 242
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Foundation for Environmental Conservation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrade, G, Rhodes, J (2012) Protected areas and local communities: an inevitable partnership toward successful conservation strategies? Ecology and Society 17: 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, M (2014) An ends–means approach to looking at governance. CID Working Paper 281: 1–62.Google Scholar
Balmford, A, Gaston, KJ, Blyth, S, James, A, Kapos, V (2003) Global variation in terrestrial conservation costs, conservation benefits, and unmet conservation needs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100: 1046–1050.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
BankTrack (2019) BankTrack Annual Report. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: BankTrack.Google Scholar
Barbier, EB (2016) Sustainability and development. Annual Review of Resource Economics 8: 261–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Z (1997) Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Beck, U (2009) World at Risk. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Boillat, S, Martin, A, Adams, T, Daniel, D, Llopis, J, Zepharovich, E et al. (2020) Why telecoupling research needs to account for environmental justice. Journal of Land Use Science 15: 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bragagnolo, C, Malhado, ACM, Jepson, P, Ladle, RJ (2016) Modelling local attitudes to protected areas in developing countries. Conservation and Society 14: 163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunge, M (1979) A systems concept of society: beyond individualism and holism. Theory and Decision 10: 13–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butchart, SHM, Di Marco, M, Watson, JEM (2016) Formulating smart commitments on biodiversity: lessons from the Aichi Targets. Conservation Letters 9: 457–468.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campagnaro, T, Sitzia, T, Bridgewater, P, Evans, D, Ellis, EC (2019) Half Earth or whole Earth: what can Natura 2000 teach us? BioScience 69: 117–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coad, L, Watson, JEM, Geldmann, J, Burgess, ND, Leverington, F, Hockings, M et al. (2019) Widespread shortfalls in protected area resourcing undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 17: 259–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collados, C, Duane, TP (1999) Natural capital and quality of life: a model for evaluating the sustainability of alternative regional development paths. Ecological Economics 30: 441–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunha, HFA, Souza, AF, Silva, JMC (2019) Public support for protected areas in new forest frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. Environmental Conservation 46: 278–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curran, D (2017) The treadmill of production and the positional economy of consumption. Canadian Review of Sociology 54: 28–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deloitte (2019) 2020 Banking and Capital Markets Outlook. London, UK: Deloitte.Google Scholar
Demaria, F, Kothari, A (2017) The Post-Development Dictionary agenda: paths to the pluriverse. Third World Quarterly 38: 2588–2599.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dias, TCAC, Cunha, AC, Silva, JMC (2016) Return on investment of the ecological infrastructure in a new forest frontier in Brazilian Amazonia. Biological Conservation 194: 184–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dudley, N, Mulongoy, KJ, Cohen, S, Stolton, S, Barber, CH, Gidda, SB (2005) Towards Effective Protected Area Systems: An Action Guide to Implement the Convention on Biological Diversity Programme of Work on Protected Areas. Montreal, Canada: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.Google Scholar
Eichler, R, Levine, R, Performance-Based Incentives Working Group (2009) Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls. Washington, DC, USA: Center for Global Development Books.Google Scholar
Emerton, J, Bishop, J, Thomas, L (2006) Sustainable Financing of Protected Areas. Gland, Switzerland, and Oxford, UK: IUCN.Google Scholar
Ferrante, L, Fearnside, PM (2019) Brazil’s new president and ‘ruralists’ threaten Amazonia’s environment, traditional peoples and the global climate. Environmental Conservation 46: 261–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gao, L, Bryan, BA (2017) Finding pathways to national-scale land-sector sustainability. Nature 544: 217–222.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Givens, JE, Huang, X, Jorgenson, AK (2019) Ecologically unequal exchange: a theory of global environmental injustice. Sociology Compass 13: e12693.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, KA, Pellow, DN, Schnaiberg, A (2015) Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy. London, UK: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallerberg, M, Scartascini, C, Stein, E eds. (2019) Who Decides the Budget? A Political Economy Analysis of the Budget Process in Latin America. Washington, DC, USA: Inter-American Development Bank.Google Scholar
Happaerts, S (2012) Are you talking to us? How subnational governments respond to global sustainable development governance. Environmental Policy and Governance 22: 127–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hausknost, D (2020) The environmental state and the glass ceiling of transformation. Environmental Politics 29: 17–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hein, L, Bagstad, KJ, Obst, C, Edens, B, Schenau, S, Castillo, G et al. (2020) Progress in natural capital accounting for ecosystems. Science 367: 514–515.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hein, L, Miller, DC, de Groot, R (2013) Payments for ecosystem services and the financing of global biodiversity conservation. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 5: 87–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hortal, J, Bello, F, Diniz-Filho, JAF, Lewinsohn, TM, Lobo, JM, Ladle, RJ (2015) Seven shortfalls that beset large-scale knowledge of biodiversity. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 46: 523–549.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howes, M, Wortley, L, Potts, R, Dedekorkut-Howes, A, Serrao-Neumann, S, Davidson, J et al. (2017) Environmental sustainability: a case of policy implementation failure? Sustainability: Science Practice and Policy 9: 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, B, Hunter, D, Peckham, S (2019) Policy failure and the policy–implementation gap: can policy support programs help? Policy Design and Practice 2: 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, V, Liu, J (2018) Telecoupling: a new frontier for global sustainability. Ecology and Society 23: 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, A, Gaston, KJ, Balmford, A (2001) Can we afford to conserve biodiversity? BioScience 51: 43–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knepper, T (2019) Using the ‘journey metaphor’ to restructure philosophy of religion. Palgrave Communications 5: 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koontz, TM, Newig, J (2014) From planning to implementation: top-down and bottom-up approaches for collaborative watershed management. Policy Studies Journal 42: 416–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacher, I (2017) Systematic conservation planning in the Anthropocene. In: Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, eds Dellasala, DA, Goldstein, MI, pp. 461–469. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G, Johnson, M (2008) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lewis, E, MacSharry, B, Juffe-Bignoli, D, Harris, N, Burrows, G, Kingston, N, Burgess, ND (2019) Dynamics in the global protected-area estate since 2004. Conservation Biology 33: 570–579.Google ScholarPubMed
Lindsey, PA, Miller, JRB, Petracca, LS, Coad, L, Dickman, AJ, Fitzgerald, KH et al. (2018) More than $1 billion needed annually to secure Africa’s protected areas with lions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115: E10788–E10796.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liquete, C, Kleeschulte, S, Dige, G, Maes, J, Grizzetti, B, Olah, B, Zulian, G (2015) Mapping green infrastructure based on ecosystem services and ecological networks: a pan-European case study. Environmental Science & Policy 54: 268–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maes, J, Barbosa, A, Baranzelli, C, Zulian, G, Batista e Silva, F, Vandecasteele, I et al. (2015) More green infrastructure is required to maintain ecosystem services under current trends in land-use change in Europe. Landscape Ecology 30: 517–534.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Margules, CR, Pressey, RL (2000) Systematic conservation planning. Nature 405: 243–253.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Matson, P, Clark, WC, Andersson, K (2016) Pursuing Sustainability: A Guide to the Science and Practice. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
McConnell, A (2015) What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze. Public Policy and Administration 30: 221–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medeiros, R, Young, CEF, Pavese, HB, Araújo, FFS (2011) The Contribution of Brazilian Conservation Units to the National Economy: Executive Summary. Brasilia, Brazil: UNEP-WCMC.Google Scholar
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Mol, APJ, Spaargaren, G, Sonnenfeld, DA (2013) Ecological modernization theory: taking stock, moving forward. In: Handbook of Environmental Sociology, eds Lockie, S, Sonnenfield, DA, Fisher, D, pp. 15–30. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Myers, N, Kent, J (2001) Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Naidoo, R, Balmford, A, Ferraro, PJ, Polasky, S, Ricketts, TH, Rouget, M (2006) Integrating economic costs into conservation planning. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21: 681–687.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
OECD (2011) How’s Life? Paris, France: OECD Publishing.Google Scholar
OECD (2017) The Governance of Land Use in OECD Countries: Policy Analysis and Recommendations. Paris, France: OECD Publishing Google Scholar
OECD (2019) Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2019. Paris, France: OECD Publishing.Google Scholar
Oosterhuis, FH, ten Brink, P (2014) Paying the Polluter: Environmentally Harmful Subsidies and Their Reform. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pascual, U, Balvanera, P, Díaz, S, Pataki, G, Roth, E, Stenseke, M et al. (2017) Valuing nature’s contributions to people: the IPBES approach. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 26–27: 7–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, BG (2018) The challenge of policy coordination. Policy Design and Practice 1: 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reside, AE, Butt, N, Adams, VM (2018) Adapting systematic conservation planning for climate change. Biodiversity and Conservation 27: 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, NC, King, PJ (1991) Policy entrepreneurs: their activity structure and function in the policy process. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 1: 147–175.Google Scholar
Rodrigues, ASL, Akcakaya, HR, Andelman, SJ, Bakarr, MI, Boitani, L, Brooks, TM et al. (2004) Global gap analysis: priority regions for expanding the global protected-area network. BioScience 54: 1092–1100.Google Scholar
Rubin, IS (2019) The Politics of Public Budgeting: Getting and Spending, Borrowing and Balancing. Washington, DC, USA: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Ruggeri, J (2009) Government investment in natural capital. Ecological Economics 68: 1723–1739.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sabatier, PA (1986) Top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementation research: a critical analysis and suggested synthesis. Journal of Public Policy 6: 21–48.Google Scholar
Sachs, JD (2015) The Age of Sustainable Development. New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandbrook, C, Fisher, JA, Holmes, G, Luque-Lora, R, Keane, A (2019) The global conservation movement is diverse but not divided. Nature Sustainability 2: 316–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva, JMC, Castro Dias, TCA, Cunha, AC, Cunha, HFA (2019) Public spending in federal protected areas in Brazil. Land Use Policy 86: 158–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva, JMC, Prasad, S (2019) Green and socioeconomic infrastructures in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for a changing climate. Climate and Development 11: 153–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva, JMC, Wheeler, E (2017) Ecosystems as infrastructure. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation 15: 32–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slätmo, E, Nilsson, K, Turunen, E (2019) Implementing green infrastructure in spatial planning in Europe. Land 8: 62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soulé, ME, Terborgh, J (1999) Continental Conservation: Scientific Foundations of Regional Reserve Networks. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Sumaila, UR, Lam, V. Le Manach, F, Swartz, W, Pauly, D (2016) Global fisheries subsidies: an updated estimate. Marine Policy 69: 189–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TEEB (2010) The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: A Synthesis of the Approach, Conclusions and Recommendations of TEEB. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme.Google Scholar
Tian, D, Xie, Y, Barnosky, AD, Wei, F (2019) Defining the balance point between conservation and development. Conservation Biology 33: 231–238.Google ScholarPubMed
Wamsler, C (2013) Managing risk: from the United Nations to local-level realities – or vice versa. Climate and Development 5: 253–255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, JEM, Dudley, N, Segan, DB, Hockings, M (2014) The performance and potential of protected areas. Nature 515: 67–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Watson, JEM, Grantham, HS, Wilson, KA, Possingham, HP (2011) Systematic conservation planning: past, present and future. In: Conservation Biogeography, eds Ladle, RJ, Whittaker, RJ, pp. 136–160. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehorn, PR, Navarro, LM, Schröter, M, Fernandez, M, Rotllan-Puig, X, Marques, A (2019) Mainstreaming biodiversity: a review of national strategies. Biological Conservation 235: 157–163.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
World Bank (2013) Inclusion Matters: The Foundation for Shared Prosperity. Washington, DC, USA: World Bank Publications.Google Scholar
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Young, JC, Thompson, DBA, Moore, P, MacGugan, A, Watt, A, Redpath, SM (2016) A conflict management tool for conservation agencies. Journal of Applied Ecology 53: 705–711.Google Scholar