Going for Green! The IUCN has composed a new list. Unlike its Red Lists (of threatened species or threatened ecosystems) this is one is a good one to be on. It’s the IUCN Green List of Protected Areas and it provides a new global standard of good practice for protected areas. Announced at last year’s […]
In an effort to engage more people with our environmental decision science, Decision Point is going Spanish. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Spanish is spoken by over 500 million people in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula. And the Spanish speaking world encompasses some of the most […]
Think global, act local, and think before you eat Whether it’s fish and chips by the seaside or prawns on the barbie at Christmas, Aussies love their seafood. For most of us it’s basic to our way of life. For a country that has such a love affair with the ocean and the food we […]
In general, a message for everyone persuades no one.
One of the biggest threats to the sustainability of the world’s oceans is the over-exploitation of marine resources. To manage this threat, which is largely a product of over-fishing and other extractive activities, governments restrict the activities that can occur in their marine areas. These restrictions include regulation of fishing effort in certain locations, or the creation of no-take zones (areas where fishing or other extractive activities are prohibited).
Millions of species remain to be discovered, and we lack ecological and distribution information for most of the world’s described species. Given this paucity of knowledge, how can we effectively conserve biodiversity?
Whilst this concept of no net loss might seem relatively straightforward in theory, actually achieving it is something different entirely.
Untangling the pretzel logic of conservation? Conservation goals at the start of the 21st century reflect a combination of contrasting ideas. ‘Ideal nature’ is something that is historically intact, but at the same time, futuristically flexible. Ideal nature is independent from humans, but also, because of the pervasiveness of human impacts, only able to reach […]
Despite the rise of disease as a key conservation challenge, the management of wildlife diseases affecting biodiversity, especially non-mammals, remains in its infancy. Chytridiomycosis, for example, caused by the pathogenic skin fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has devastated amphibian communities globally and is considered the worst recorded wildlife disease. Infection has been detected in 42% of amphibian […]
Identifying the deleterious ecological effects of developments, such as roads, mining, and urban expansion, is essential for informing decisions surrounding these developments and identifying appropriate forms of mitigation. Impact evaluations tend to reduce complex impacts of human activity to simple, user-friendly metrics to streamline integration of economic and environmental concerns in decision making. They are […]
Environmental offsetting involves compensating for the residual adverse impacts of an action on the environment by generating an equivalent benefit elsewhere. As the prevalence of environmental offsetting grows, so does the challenge of translating no-net-loss goals to workable policy. From 2011–2012, the Australian Government developed an Environmental Offsets Policy and an accompanying metric (the Offsets […]
If we acknowledged the pretzel logic of current conservation thinking – attempting to preserve a historically intact nature while managing it to be futuristically flexible – would we open space for more effective outcomes? Nicole Heller and Richard Hobbs believe it’s worth a shot. Read more… If we applied offset policies from different countries to […]