Hint Of Success
Amid gloom, some conservation victories
“You’ve got to spread joy, up to the maximum, bring gloom down, to the minimum,” goes Johnny Mercer’s big band pop hit from the 1940s. Now, some conservation biologists are trying to “ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive” (and eliminate the negative) in a new review of conservation success stories.
Studies suggest that “conservation actions have largely failed to arrest the ongoing global collapse in biodiversity; as a consequence, widespread pessimism prevails in the conservation community,” the late Navjot S. Sodhi of the National University of Singapore and colleagues write in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Successes, meanwhile, “are rarely highlighted or fail to attract wide attention.”
To offer “a more balanced view,” the authors offer a laundry list of species and ecosystems that are benefiting from an array of conservation efforts, ranging from tiny projects that protect a single species, to huge multinational efforts to preserve vast swathes of habitat and crack down on harmful exploitation. “Our definition of ‘success’ is admittedly loose and based on any evidence of positive conservation outcomes,” they note, “such as population increases of endangered species following targeted interventions.”
In the good news category:
- The creation of Bardia National Park in Nepal has enabled the density of wild ungulates increased fourfold in just 22 years – leading to increases in population of both endangered tigers and leopards.
- In the Brazilian Amazon, the creation of large protected areas helped reduce deforestation rates by an estimated 37% between 2002 and 2009.
- Habitat protection has helped triple nesting success for some threatened African, Asian and Australasian parrots.
- Habitat protection and anti-whaling laws have resulted in the population recovery of Pacific gray whales.
- A combination of food supplementation, provision of nest boxes, translocations, a ban on insecticides and the eradication of invasive species (cats and brown rats) reversed the decline of one of the rarest birds in the world, the Seychelles magpie robin.
- Multinational efforts to create transboundary national parks in Asia, and massive marine preserves in the Pacific.
- Stepped up efforts to pressure Walmart and other multinational companies to “green” supply chains that contribute to environmental destruction.
Such successes “should not be taken as a call to rest on our laurels,” the authors write, noting that “more conservation projects fail than succeed… Instead, our aim is to engender hope and inspire others to continue their dedicated efforts. With the global population expected to surge past 10 billion people by the end of this century, conservationists will face increasing challenges and a need for more funding and political and popular support. Having achieved some notable successes, conservationists should pat themselves on the back and then redouble their efforts at all conservation scales.” – David Malakoff | August 12, 2011
Source: Sodhi, N., Butler, R., Laurance, W., & Gibson, L. (2011). Conservation successes at micro-, meso- and macroscales. Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.002
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