How to conserve biological diversity: Perspectives from Ambio

Biological diversity (biodiversity for short) provides a powerful example of how a new term can generate substantial international action. The utility of treating genes, species, and ecosystems together emerged in the mid-1980s, highlighted by an international convergence of university researchers, economists, foresters, agroecologists, ethicists, and government resource managers brought together by the visionary Edward O. Wilson (Wilson 1988), perhaps inspired by his earlier work on sociobiology (Wilson 1975). This broad constituency addressed both the threats to biodiversity and the social, scientific, and economic benefits of its conservation. The next step was a series of discussions organized by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) among governments and non-governmental conservation organizations about how to promote more effective international cooperation to address the problem of biodiversity loss. The climax of this effort was agreement on a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 1992) at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit on 5 June, entered into force on 29 December 1993 (Sayer et al. 2021), and has now been ratified by all but one of the UN member countries (ironically, the only non-party is the USA, which played an active role in its negotiation and is deeply affected by its provisions).

One of the innovations of the CBD was the attention given to traditional ecological knowledge (article 8j), a topic that has been well addressed in Ambio. Shortly after the CBD was agreed, Gadgil et al. (1993) provided detailed examples of the resource management practices of people who have long depended on their local ecosystems for their survival and cultural identity, often supported by their belief systems that give spiritual values to key resource systems such as watershed protection forests. The principles of indigenous rights to resources and the value of traditional knowledge are now in the mainstream of biodiversity conservation, and community-based resource management systems are enhancing the land rights of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world (Doyle 2015; Gilbert 2016). Gadgil et al. (2021) have brought this concept up to date, showing that traditional knowledge is still relevant to the modern challenges to conserving biodiversity.

The CBD’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 was highly relevant to protected areas as a major conservation tool (Pimm 2021; Sayer et al. 2021). Its target 11 called for establishing at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water biomes as protected areas, along with 10% of coastal and marine biomes. These were to be effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative, and well connected as parts of systems of effective area-based conservation measures that are integrated into wider landscapes and seascapes.

Ambio has provided useful perspectives on how these protected area design issues could be addressed more effectively. Bengtsson et al. (2003) highlighted some of the limitations of protected areas, which covered just over 11% of the land at that time. Protected areas were considered too static when they need to be more dynamic. A dynamic landscape approach that mimics natural disturbance regimes could include, for example, successional lands that are recovering from over-exploitation; these resemble the territories managed by indigenous peoples such as the shifting cultivation practices described by Gadgil et al. (1993). Almost a decade later, Hanski (2011) presented detailed evidence that species can suffer from fragmented landscapes and protected areas are often too small to support viable populations, underlining the CBD target 11 point that connectivity of habitats is essential (also see Bengtsson et al. 2003). The importance of landscape connectivity is now in the conservation mainstream, with detailed guidelines prepared by an IUCN international team (Hilty et al. 2020).

The protected area design concepts of Hanski (2011) and Bengtsson et al. (2003) are now being addressed by governments under the CBD (Maxwell et al. 2020). They have adopted the concept of other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM), which are geographically defined areas other than protected areas that are governed and managed in ways that conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services and provide cultural, spiritual, and socio-economic benefits (SCBD 2018). They could include many landscapes owned or managed by indigenous peoples.

Today’s environmental, social, economic, and political conditions require innovative responses that are appropriate to the emerging conditions. Climate change is a troubling reality, with floods, fires, heatwaves, and melting polar ice caps contributing new challenges to biodiversity, sustainable development, human health, and the effective management of protected areas. Many environmental problems are worsening, especially the loss of species (at a rate at least 1000 times the background rate—Pimm 2021), so conserving biodiversity in the coming decade will need to be well aware of how land management can support national and global efforts to address climate change and adapt to it. Bengtsson et al. (2021) have shown how some of the guiding concepts have been developed.

The responses to climate change and biodiversity loss provide the necessary ingredients to support a substantial increase in the amount of land, freshwater, and saltwater habitats receiving effective conservation management. It is timely to again follow E.O. Wilson, who has suggested that half of the land and freshwater habitats and at least a third of the coastal and marine habitats should be under biodiversity-oriented spatial planning and management regimes (Wilson 2016). This could include protected areas, restoration of degraded lands, other effective habitat management, lands managed by Indigenous peoples, nature-based solutions, urban protected areas, and other conservation-based habitat management as called for by all of the contributors to this Ambio issue.