A recent article “Conservation needs to break free from global priority mapping” argues we have too many global conservation priority maps. This has stirred up controversy about the usefulness of those maps and whether scientists are wasting there time, and even insulting people, by making them.
Here are some of my thoughts.
To my mind, there are three issues at play in this debate:
What does ‘conservation priority’ mean?
How useful are global biodiversity maps?
‘Neo-colonial’ science
First, what’s a ‘conservation priority?’
In a response letter we argued that effective conservation requires clear objectives and prioritizing actions, not places or species. Lots of studies have used the term ‘priority’ loosely, e.g. you see studies talking about priority areas, species or threats. But the problem with this language is it doesn’t say what we need to do. Priorities should be about actions, then they are clear. Many have previously showed that if you follow actions guided by ‘priority threats’ or ‘priority areas’ you can end up with costly and ineffective conservation outcomes.
For example, consider a case where the priority species is one doomed for extinction, or an enigmatic one that isn’t that threatened, we’d be wasting money trying to conserve it. Same goes, if we prioritize ‘threat hotspots’ then we may spend big on local conservation when unmanageable threats, like climate change are a big issue.
Priorities should consider what the objectives are, what the actions are, and constraints on those actions. This is important to find those places where conservation can be most effective.
I’d define effective as outcomes that the best you can get relative to what would have happened if you didn’t do that action.
Lots of global priority maps are actually maps of hotspots of species richness etc… Nothing wrong with that, we just shouldn’t claim they are conservation priorities.
Second, how useful are global biodiversity maps?
- Unclear theory of change
- Climate maps so useful
- Issues with scale/resolution
- repeating patterns we already know?
- Wyborn and Evans unfortunately shortened their focus to ‘global maps’ which I think led to widespread misinterpretation of the paper as a criticism of global maps in general. Also their review includes many global maps that aren’t prioritisations.
So I think they are fine, but important to have a theory of change But should onus for scientists be on ToC?
Career progression
Finally, global maps touch on the issue of ‘Neo-colonial’ science
Also related helicopter science Engagement important. Duan’s talk Fern’s article