Ray of Hope

Conservation scientists need to deliver good news along with the bad

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Bad news, it’s said, races round the world before good news rises from its bed. But if conservation researchers want to protect biodiversity, they’ll need to do a better job of delivering news that builds hope, two researchers argue.

“Much excellent research has emphasized the severity of threats facing biodiversity,” Stephen T. Garnett of Australia’s Charles Darwin University and David B. Lindenmayer of The Australian National University write in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. But “berating people about biodiversity decline ignores fundamental human behaviors,” they note, and may be feeding avoidance, denial and apathy – rather than promoting action.

A better route to getting politicians and the public on the conservation bandwagon, they argue, is to balance the bad news with “carefully targeted messages that empower people.” In particular, “researchers need to provide the science not only for the campaigns lamenting environmental loss, but also, most importantly, for those celebrating the effectiveness of conservation.”

For instance, researchers could do more to publicize “some conservation achievements of the last half century are extraordinary and inspirational.” South Korea was nearly denuded after the Korean War, for instance, but forest now covers nearly two-thirds of the country.  And for 50 years, the Antarctic Treaty has successfully preserved some 14% of the planet’s land mass. The goal, they emphasize, “is not to engender misplaced optimism in the face of perilous odds, but rather to promote hope, demonstrate what can be achieved and how to achieve it.”

The duo calls for a trio of specific actions to build hope for biodiversity:

1)  Hold a series of international conferences devoted to describing successful conservation programs.

2) Persuade journal editors to “promote the publication of papers that highlight successful conservation actions, as well as special issues on approaches leading to positive policy change and on-ground achievement… We suspect that there is currently a bias towards citations of ‘bad news’ papers.”

3) Fund “interdisciplinary research on the factors underpinning effective, successful and sustained conservation, in multiple settings, and at multiple scales.”

“Given that pessimism is as infectious as enthusiasm,” they conclude, “a failure to acknowledge the major conservation achievements to date could mean that prophecies of doom might become self fulfilling…  Hope is vital to the prospects for biodiversity conservation in coming decades.” – David Malakoff | February 2, 2011

Source: Garnett, S., & Lindenmayer, D. (2011). Conservation science must engender hope to succeed. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 26 (2), 59-60 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2010.11.009

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